:  ■:■ :  ■'■'-' '    ::  ■ 


THE     NEMESIS     OF     FROUDE 


NEW  LETTERS  AND  MEMORIALS 
OF   JANE    WELSH    CARLYLE. 

Annotated  by  Thomas  Carlyle,  and  Edited  by 
Alexander  Carlyle,  with  an  Introduction  by  Sir  James 
Crichton-Browne,  M.D.,  LL.D.,  F.R.S.,  with  sixteen 
illustrations.     In  two  volumes,  demy  8vo.,  2$s.  net. 

SOME  PRESS   OPINIONS. 

The  Daily  Chronicle.— '"Let  us  turn  with  all  gratitude  to  the  new 
series  of  letters  which  the  editor  here  gives.  .  .  .  Mrs.  Carlyle  has 
long  ranked  with  Byron,  Lamb,  her  husband,  and  one  or  two  more, 
amongst  the  best  letter-writers  in  our  language." 

The  Daily  News. — "The  publication  of  these  volumes  is  not 
only  the  most  important  literary  event  of  the  year.  It  is  an  act 
of  elementary  justice." 

Westminster  Gazette.—'1  It  is  a  pleasure  under  any  circum- 
stances to  have  more  of  Mrs.  Carlyle's  letters.  Few  letters  in  the 
language  have  in  such  perfection  the  qualities  which  good  letters 
should  possess." 

TIu  Times. — "About  Mrs.  Carlyle's  conversation  there  has  been 
only  one  difference  of  opinion  among  those  who  had  the  privilege 
of  hearing  it.  Some  put  it  just  above  her  husband's,  and  some  just 
below.  But  after  reading  her  letters,  we  feel  inclined  to  ask 
whether  Jane  was  greater  than  Thomas,  or  Thomas  greater  than 
Jane." 


RE  A  D  V   I  MM  EDI  A  TEL  Y. 

NEW     LETTERS     OF     THOMAS 

CARLYLE.  Edited  and  Annotated  by  Alexander 
Carlyle.  In  two  volumes,  with  illustrations.  Uniform 
with  "New  Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle."     Demy  8vo.,  2ls.  net. 


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THE  NEMESIS 
OF     FROUDE 

A  REJOINDER  TO  J.  A.  FROUDE'S 
"MY  RELATIONS  WITH  CARLYLE,"  BY 
SIR  JAMES  CRICHTON-BROWNE,  M.D., 
AND   ALEXANDER   CARLYLE     ©        ©        © 


JOHN     LANE,     THE     BODLEY     HEAD 
LONDON    AND    NEW    YORK.     MDCCCCIH 

i       ' 


Copyright 

in  U.S.A. 

By  John  Lane. 


- 
: 


Wm.  Clowes  &  Sons,  Limited,  Printers,  London. 


• ■    •    •  ■ 


to 

CO 

en 


TR 


g  PREFACE 

In     the    Prefatory    note    to    "  My    Relations    with 
Carlyle,"  by  James    Anthony   Froude,    it  is  stated 
by  the  Editors,   Mr.  Ashley  A.  Froude  and  Miss 
^Mar^aret  Froude,  that  it  would  never  have   been 
2>given  to  the  world  had  not  the  production  of  the 
m"  New    Letters    and    Memorials    of    Jane    Welsh 
Carlyle,"  with  the  serious  charges  contained  in  the 
Introduction  and  Foot-notes,  appeared   to  demand 
its  publication.     But  the  serious  charges  referred  to, 
co  although  no  doubt    rendered  more   serious  by  the 
"  fresh  evidence  in  their  support  brought  to  light  in 
-<  the  "  New  Letters  and  Memorials  " — evidence  which 
^Mr.  Froude  had  suppressed — were  not  in  any  case 
new  charges,  but  the    mere    repetition   of  charges 
which  were  first  made  twenty  years  ago,  and  which 
are    not    really  traversed  by  "  My  Relations    with 
^Carlyle."     Mr.    Froude    attempts    to    explain    his 
^superabundant  verbal  inaccuracies,   but  has    not    a 
£  word  to  say  in  answer  to  the  grave  charges  brought 
.against   him,    of  giving  garbled  extracts   of  docu- 
3-ments  and   omitting  of  set  purpose  such    portions 
of  them  as  did  not  fit  in  with   his  own   views,   of 
contravening  again   and   again  the  solemn  injunc- 
tions imposed  on  him  by  Carlyle,  of  making  claims 
to    advantages    to    which    he    was    not  entitled,  of 


■ 


VI 


PREFACE 


refusing  to  implement  an  unconditional  promise, 
and  generally  of  producing  a  Biography  elaborated 
with  the  art  of  the  practised  romancer  in  which 
the  true  features  of  the  subject  can  scarcely  be 
recognised,  but  in  which  assertion  and  inference, 
unsupported  by  evidence,  are  palmed  off  for  correct 
statement.  On  all  these  points  he  has  allowed 
judgment  to  go  by  default.  His  defence  consists 
in  the  accentuation  of  what  he  had  already  said 
derogatory  of  Carlyle,  with  the  addition  of  fresh 
charges  against  him  of  a  very  odious  description, 
which,  had  they  been  true,  should  in  decency  have 
been  kept  concealed,  but  which,  being  groundless, 
as  we  hope  to  prove,  reflect  discredit  on  those  who 
have  rashly,  or  in  the  spirit  of  retaliation,  thrust 
them  prominently  forward.  That  Mr.  Froude  ever 
decided  to  keep  silence  on  these  charges  we  take 
leave  to  doubt. 

As  early  as  1881  Mr.  Froude,  in  a  letter  which 
appeared  in  the  Times  of  May  6th,  alluded  to 
reasons  which  he  could  not  give  "  without  entering 
on  a  subject  on  which  it  is  better  to  be  silent,"  and 
added  that  he  would  be  sorry  if  the  difficulty  of 
his  task  was  "  increased  by  a  demand  for  further 
explanations  which  I  shall  be  very  reluctant  to  give." 
He  was  at  once  challenged  by  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  in  the  Times,  to  satisfy  the  curiosity  he  had 
awakened  by  his  reference  to  "  hidden  reasons  and 
explanations."  To  this  challenge  he  made  no 
reply;  but  on  the  20th  of  April,  1886,  when  he 
heard  that  Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  was 
about  to  publish  the  "  Early  Letters  of  Carlyle," 


[^u-u  j  <l  V*iUv  Wit.  u  (/>frj  cJ  2w  W2;  Jovh 
4J  ,u3  <*i£#w{<  i<^^  u*  ^i  kvfc  ^  CtA^iwtcr 

kvlM    4u/^^i(^jL  OaJ  tvt^uA  £fy  ^CJ  W  ^  ^^ 

Hfll  &J  <^  *****  i^J  tW"<Uv  ewj*£ft\*  ,%vu^ 
K^.  aw  fcU  t-M.  <4ji  ^3  u^  id  kw  J&*h 
Um  Kjl  k^hLUlir  a  dv  UL  W*  b^  .  (^}  u*oA  K 

FACSIMILE  OF  CARLYLF.'s  HANDWRITING  IN    I  832.  AT  THE  AGE  OF  37. 

See   "Reminiscences."    Norton's    Edition,    i.,  p.    5;      Froude's     Edition,    i.,    p.    8. 

See   also  Frontispiece. 


PREFACE 


Vll 


he  wrote  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  drawing  atten- 
tion to  the  passage  in  Mrs.  Carlyle's  Journal  relating 
to  "  two  blue  marks  on  the  wrist,"  and  hinting  that 
this  secret  might  have  to  be  revealed.  Again,  in 
1896,  there  was  a  threat  to  publish  "My  Relations 
with  Carlyle,"  merely  because  Mr.  Alexander  Carlyle 
had  requested  that  a  private  letter  by  Mr.  Froude 
to  Mr.  McPherson,  which  was  published  in  his 
short  Life  of  Carlyle,  should  not  be  allowed  to  appear 
in  a  second  edition,  lest  it  should  involve  a  renewal 
of  the  old  controversy  about  the  papers.  On  this 
occasion  Mr.  Leman,  Mr.  Ashley  Froude's  solicitor, 
wrote  as  follows :  "  Mr.  Froude's  representatives 
have  no  desire  to  re-open  any  controversial  questions 
in  relation  to  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle,  but  I  know  that 
there  is  in  existence  a  Memorandum  by  the  late 
Mr.  Froude  written  in  anticipation  of  any  further 
controversy  on  the  lines  of  the  former  one  (the 
main  point  in  which  is  however  known  to  me  and 
I  believe  to  a  few  other  people),  which,  if  published, 
would  throw  perhaps  an  unexpected  light  upon  the 
whole  business,  and  materially  justify  what  he  has 
written  and  printed." 

It  is  clear  that  this  Memorandum,  which  was 
found  in  a  despatch  box  after  Mr.  Froude's  death, 
but  which,  it  is  said,  he  had  shown  to  no  one,  has 
not  been  kept  altogether  private  by  his  representa- 
tives, but  has  been  held  in  readiness  for  a  convenient 
moment  for  that  publication  which  Mr.  Froude, 
notwithstanding  his  alleged  decision  to  remain  silent, 
had  obviously  all  along  contemplated  and  intended. 
Towards  the  end  of  the  Memorandum  he  writes, 


V1I1 


PREFACE 


"  If  I  have  now  told  all  it  is  because  I  see  that 
nothing  short  of  it  will  secure  me  the  fair  judgment 
to  which  I  am  entitled.  .  .  .  The  whole  facts  are 
now  made    known.  ...   I   have    nothing   more    to 

reveal." 

It  is  to  be  regretted  that  "  My  Relations  with 

Carlyle "  was  not  published  at  an  earlier  period, 
for  many  persons,  who  could  have  refuted  state- 
ments contained  in  it,  have  passed  away ;  still,  even 
now,  Carlyle's  friends  rejoice  that  it  is  brought  forth, 
so  that  they  are  enabled  to  grapple  with  allegations 
against  him,  for  which  Mr.  Froude  has  made 
himself  responsible,  but  which  so  long  as  they 
remained  impalpable  rumours  it  was  impossible  for 
them  to  deal  with.  The  rumours  reflecting  on 
Carlyle,  which  can  be  now  traced  to  their  source, 
at  first  mere  gaseous  gossip,  have  become  gradually 
congealed  and  glued  to  his  name  with  many 
offensive  accretions,  and  there  are  certainly  multi- 
tudes of  persons  amongst  us  who  believe  that  he  was, 
as  represented  in  Mr.  Froude's  posthumous  Frag- 
ment, a  man  of  transcendent  ability,  but  selfish, 
over-bearing,  cruel,  and  contemptible.  To  show,  as 
we  hope  to  be  able  to  do,  even  at  this  late  hour,  that 
Mr.  Froude  was  wrong — that  he  believed  a  myth, 
betrayed  his  trust,  and  must  himself  take  the  place 
of  the  man  he  has  so  unmercifully  pilloried,  will 
supply  as  striking  an  example  as  modern  literary 
history  affords  of  what  the  Greeks  called  "  Nemesis  " 
and  Carlyle  the  "Justice  of  God." 


THE     NEMESIS     OF     FROUDE 


•  >      »         .... 

i   )      J    > 

•  ■  '     '■' 


THE  NEMESIS  OF  FROUDE 

Mr.  Froude's  account  of  his  relations  with  Carlyle, 
found  written  in  pencil  in  a  notebook  after  his  death, 
was  prepared  while  he  was  in  Cuba  in  1887,  and  he 
had  not  therefore,  while  writing  it,  access  to  the 
correspondence  and  documents  bearing  on  the 
matters  with  which  he  dealt.  One  would  have 
thought  that  in  composing  a  vindication  of  him- 
self in  connexion  with  his  discharge  of  a  trust 
which  he  was  accused  of  having  betrayed  —  a 
vindication  which  he  bequeathed  to  his  children 
that  they  might  have  something  to  rely  on  should 
his  honour  or  good  faith  be  assailed — he  would 
have  desired  to  consult  authorities  and  to  verify 
every  statement  he  made  ;  but  that  was  not 
Froude's  way  of  going  to  work.  It  its  obituary 
notice  of  him  the  Times  said  :  "He  was  not  a 
student,  in  the  real  sense  of  the  term ;  he  had 
neither  the  desire  to  probe  his  authorities  to  the 
bottom  nor  the  patience  to  do  so.  .  .  .  It  is  said 
that  at  the  time  when  Froude  was  busy  on  the  part 
of  his  history  where  Burleigh  plays  a  leading  part 
he  was  invited  to  stay  at  Hatfield  and  make  an 
examination  of  the  masses  of  Cecil  papers  there 
preserved — at  a  time,  it  must  be  remembered, 
before  the  Historical  Manuscripts  Commission  had 
published  any  of  them — and  that  Froude  went,  and 


B 


2  THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

stayed  one  day.  .  .  .  Scholars  who  read  his  brilliant 
sketch  of  Caesar  can  see  plainly  that  he  had  never 
properly  read  Cicero's  letters,  or  not  many  of  them. 
When  he  visited  the  West  Indies,  with  a  view  to 
writing  his  '  English  in  the  West  Indies,'  he  pre- 
ferred to  sit  in  the  shade  reading  Dante  rather  than 
to  see  for  himself  the  institutions  of  Jamaica,  about 
which,  he  told  his  host,  he  knew  enough  already. 
And,  most  noteworthy  of  all,  though  he  visited 
Simancas  and  stayed  some  time  there,  it  is  un- 
questionable that  he  learned  comparatively  little 
about  the  records  there  preserved."  True  to  his 
usual  method,  in  writing  "  My  Relations  with  Car- 
lyle,"  Froude  disdained  the  assistance  of  records  or 
witnesses,  but  trusting  entirely  to  his  memory  and 
imagination,  in  the  intervals  of  his  study  of  Dante 
and  while  absorbing  the  history  and  institutions  of 
Cuba  at  the  pores,  produced  an  Apology  which  is 
itself  in  need  of  an  apologetic.  There  is  scarcely 
one  line  of  Froude's  pamphlet  that  does  not  require 
correction  or  qualification,  and  the  general  impression 
it  creates  is  as  wide  of  the  truth  as  it  is  possible  to 
be.  A  paragon  of  errors,  Froude  has  never  shown 
himself  more  inaccurate.  Never  has  his  treacherous 
memory  more  signally  beguiled  him  or  more  in- 
dubitably proved  itself  to  have  been  an  organ,  not  for 
retention  and  reproduction,  but  for  transformation. 
It  did  not,  like  other  men's  memories,  yield  up  what 
it  had  appropriated,  but  a  special  secretion  of  its 
own.  In  Carlyle's  case  it  was  supplied  with  heart's 
blood  and  has  given  out  bile.  The  honoured  master, 
the  old   familiar  friend  has  been  converted  into  a 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE  3 

grotesque  monster  compounded  of  strength  and 
weakness,  dignity  and  deformity.  The  pamphlet  is 
made  up  of  the  writhings  of  wounded  egotism  and 
of  virulent  attacks  on  the  character  and  conduct  of 
the  man  whom  he  had  extolled  as  a  great  spiritual 
teacher.  Having  first  assassinated  the  reputation  of 
Carlyle,  Froude  now  mutilates  the  remains.  What- 
ever merits  his  Life  of  Carlyle  possessed — and  no 
one  denies  it  some  merits — are  now  destroyed  by 
this  posthumous  pamphlet.  Having  drawn  a  por- 
trait of  Carlyle  possessing  at  least  some  more  or 
less  distant  resemblance,  he  has  deliberately  thrown 
a  pailful  of  liquid  lampblack  over  it  and  rendered  it 
irrecognisable  as  the  portrait  of  anything  human. 

It  is  to  be  regretted  that  Froude's  paper,  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle,"  has  not  been  published 
exactly  as  it  was  found  in  the  despatch-box  after  his 
death.  The  first  few  pages  have  been  withheld, 
because  they  are  "of  too  intimate  a  nature  to  be 
given  to  the  public  ; "  but  that  may  be  truly  said  of 
the  whole  essay,  and  it  is  clear  that  Froude  himself 
had  drawn  no  distinction  of  this  kind,  but  had 
anticipated  that  all  of  what  he  had  written  would 
be  published.  It  may  be  assumed  that  the  omitted 
pages  would  not  in  any  way  have  strengthened 
his  case  against  Carlyle,  but  they  might  have 
supplied  the  means  of  testing  the  fidelity  of  his 
narrative  in  matters  of  great  personal  moment, 
in  respect  of  which,  even  a  recreant  memory 
rarely  goes  astray.  The  epitome  of  some  of  the 
omitted  matter  given  as  an  introduction  to  the 
essay    undoubtedly   suggests    that,   in   the  interests 

b   2 


4  THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

of  veracity,  omission  was  advisable.  It  is  the 
object  of  this  epitome  to  show  that  Froude  could 
have  no  earthly  motive  to  misrepresent  Carlyle, 
to  whom  the  crisis  of  his  life  was  due  and  in  sub- 
mission to  whose  teachings  he  had  made  great 
personal  sacrifices.  But  the  facts  quoted  in  support 
of  this  contention  will  not  bear  critical  examination. 
"He  [Froude]  had  taken  deacon's  orders,  and 
looked  to  the  Church  as  his  regular  profession.  So 
much  as  a  doubt,"  he  tell  us,  "had  so  far  never 
crossed  his  mind,  of  the  truth  of  the  creed  in  which 
he  had  been  brought  up."  "  It  was  at  this  time," 
he  says,  "  that  Carlyle's  books  came  in  my  way. 
They  produced  on  me  what  Evangelicals  call  '  a 
conviction  of  sin.'  .  .  .  They  taught  me  that  the 
religion  in  which  I  had  been  reared  was  but  one  of 
many  dresses  in  which  spiritual  truth  had  arrayed 
itself,  and  that  the  creed  was  not  literally  true  so 
far  as  it  was  a  narrative  of  facts."  It  seems  a 
pity  to  have  to  overthrow  such  a  moving  little  bit 
of  autobiography,  but  the  tyranny  of  dates  makes 
it  untenable.  It  was  in  1841,  at  Falmouth,  that 
Carlyle's  books  first  came  in  Froude's  way,  when 
they  were  brought  to  his  notice  by  John  Sterling, 
and  at  once  arrested  his  attention,  and  it  was  not 
until  1844  that  he  took  deacon's  orders.  He  has 
himself  told  us  in  "The  Nemesis  of  Faith,"  that  it 
was  the  "  French  Revolution,"  which  he  read  in 
1 84 1,  that  first  stirred  his  conscience,  so  the  alterna- 
tives are  these :  either  he  is  wrong  in  saying  that  it 
was  Carlyle's  books  that  undermined  and  overthrew 
his  faith,  or  he  took  deacon's  orders  after  his  faith 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE  5 

was  disintegrated,  and  went  on  assuming  faith  when 
he  had  it  not,  for  he  preached  a  funeral  sermon  in 
St.  Mary's  Church,  Torquay,  in  1847. 

For  the  purposes  of  "  My  Relations  with 
Carlyle "  Froude  has  clearly  exaggerated  Carlyle's 
early  influence  over  him.  He  would  have  us 
believe  that  it  was  this  influence  which  led  him  to 
give  up  his  fellowship  and  abandon  his  orders,  and 
which  changed  the  whole  current  of  his  life,  but  it 
would  not  be  difficult  to  show  that  many  other 
influences  contributed  to  shape  his  career.  When 
he  tells  us  now,  that  it  was  Carlyle's  writings  which 
first  made  him  "realise  the  meaning  of  duty  and  the 
overpowering  obligation  to  do  it,"  we  must  remember 
that  he  wrote  to  Hallam,  Lord  Tennyson,  "  I  owe 
to  your  father  the  first  serious  reflexions  upon  life 
and  the  nature  of  it."  When  he  tells  us  now,  that 
it  was  Carlyle's  writings  that  deprived  him  of  belief 
in  the  facts  of  his  creed,  we  must  remember  that  he 
has  previously  stated  that  it  was  his  studies  for  the 
Life  of  St.  Neot,  which  Newman  had  invited  him 
to  write,  that  put  the  breaking  strain  on  his  credulity. 
Goethe,  Lessing,  Neander,  Schleiermacher,  the 
Tractarians  and  the  Evangelicals  had  all  a  hand  in 
the  making  of  Froude,  whose  views  underwent  a 
gradual  development.  Not  till  long  after  he  had 
definitely  left  the  Ark  of  tha  Covenant,  could  he 
find  a  twig  on  which  to  settle.  Carlyle's  doctrine 
ultimately  obtained  the  ascendency  in  his  mind,  but 
his  personal  influence  was  not  brought  to  bear 
on  him  until  1849,  when  he  was  introduced  by 
Spedding,  not  perhaps  until  i860  when  he  settled  in 


6  THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

London  and  was  admitted  on  friendly  terms  to  the 
circle  at  Cheyne  Row. 

In  the  first  instance  Froude,  according  to  his 
own  account,  was  repelled  by  Carlyle's  objurgations 
and  demeanour.  "He  denounced  everybody  and 
everything !  "  and  although  Froude  was  of  opinion, 
being  then  apparently  in  a  damnatory  mood,  that 
this  wholesale  denunciation  "  was  intensely  true 
and  right,"  he  felt  "  that  it  would  be  impossible  to 
live  with  him  on  equal  terms."  Carlyle,  on  the 
other  hand,  must  have  been  powerfully  attracted  to 
Froude,  for,  contrary  to  what  was  ever  known  of 
him  in  any  other  case,  he  forced  his  acquaintance 
upon  him  :  so  Froude  tells  us.  He  called  on  him, 
wished  to  see  more  of  him  and  invited  him  to  be  his 
companion  in  his  walks  and  rides  ;  and  as  it  would 
have  been  ungracious  to  reject  such  advances, 
Froude  grasped  the  proffered  hand  and  was  placed 
on  a  friendly  footing  in  Carlyle's  home,  where  he 
seems  to  have  begun  at  once  to  make  those  un- 
favourable observations  which  have  dimmed  and 
defaced  his  Biography  of  his  host,  and  which  are 
marshalled  with  relentless  candour  in  his  posthumous 
pamphlet. 

That  Froude  himself  frequently  begged  to  be 
admitted  to  the  Cheyne  Row  household  is  certain. 
Mrs.  Carlyle  has  placed  a  photograph  of  him  in  her 
album,  and  pasted  underneath  it  a  characteristic 
cutting  from  a  letter  in  Froude's  handwriting  which 
reads,  "May  I  come  to  tea  on  Friday?"  Intro- 
duced into  closer  relations  with  the  life  at  Cheyne 
Row  he  could    not  help  becoming  acquainted,   he 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE  7 

tells  us,  with  many  things  which  he  would  rather 
not  have  known,  but  which  he  has  carefully  treasured 
up  against  the  day  of  wrath. 

First  of  all  it  was  borne   in  upon   Froude   that 
Carlyle  had  an  ungovernable  temper  which  caused 
much  domestic    unhappiness.      "  Rumour  said,  that 
she  [Mrs.  Carlyle]  and  Carlyle  quarrelled  often,  and 
I  could  easily  believe    it,"  he  added,    "from  occa- 
sional expressions  about  him  which  fell  from  her." 
Farther  on  he  states  explicitly  that  they  quarrelled 
fiercely    and    violently,    and   by    various    allusions 
throughout  his  paper  he  seeks  to  convey  the  idea 
that  they  lived  a  cat  and  dog  life,  owing  mainly  to 
Carlyle's  fractious,  impatient  and  selfish  disposition. 
"In  Carlyle's  catalogue  of  his  own  duties  self-restraint 
seemed  to  be  forgotten."     But  Froude  and  rumour 
cannot  on  this  question  stand  against  the  phalanx 
of  witnesses   on  the  other   side.      Almost   without 
exception,  the  other  intimates  of  the  household  at 
Cheyne  Row,   who  had  as   good   opportunities   of 
judging  as  Froude  and  perhaps  more  discernment 
than  he,  take  a  directly  opposite  view  and  testify  to 
the  generally  amiable  terms  on  which  Carlyle  and 
his  wife  jogged  along  together.     Moncure  Conway 
observed  that  "  when  Carlyle's  mood  was  stormiest, 
her   voice   could  in    an    instant   allay  it :    the    lion 
was   led  as  by  a  little  child."     "  In  the  conversa- 
tion which  went  on   in    the   old   drawing-room  at 
Chelsea,  there  was  no  suggestion  of  things  secret 
or   reserved ;    people   with   sensitive    toes    had  no 
careful  provision  made  for  them,  and  had  best  keep 
away ;    free,   frank   and   simple   speech   and    inter- 


8  THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

course  were  the  unwritten  but  ever-present  law. 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  wit  and  humour  were  overflowing, 
and  she  told  anecdotes  about  her  husband  under 
which  he  sat  with  a  patient  look  of  repudiation, 
until  the  loud  laugh  broke  out  and  led  the  chorus." 
Emerson  wrote  in  his  Diary,  "  Carlyle  and  his  wife 
live  on  beautiful  terms.  Their  ways  are  very 
engaging  and  in  her  book-case  all  his  books  are 
inscribed  to  her  as  they  come  from  year  to  year, 
each  with  some  significant  lines."  Professor  Masson 
placed  on  record  that,  "  One  of  the  pleasantest  sights 
in  the  Cheyne  Row  household,  on  a  winter  evening, 
was  Carlyle  himself,  seated  in  a  chair  by  the  fire,  or 
reclining  on  the  hearth-rug,  pipe  in  mouth,  listening 
benignantly  and  admiringly  to  those  caricatures  of  his 
ways,  and  illustrations  of  his  recent  misbehaviours, 
from  his  beloved  Jane's  lips.  Insufficient  appreciation 
of  the  amount  of  consciously  humorous,  and  mutu- 
ally admiring  give-and-take  of  this  kind  in  the 
married  life  of  the  extraordinary  pair,  both  of  them 
so  sensitively  organised,  has  had  much  to  do,  it 
seems  to  me,  with  that  elaborately  studied  contrast 
of  them  which  Mr.  Froude  has  succeeded  in 
impressing  on  the  public."  "  The  notion  of  Carlyle," 
says  Masson,  referring  to  Froude's  portrait  of  him, 
"as  in  any  sense  a  misanthrope,  a  hard-hearted 
man,  a  mere  raging  or  railing  egotist,  is  one  of 
those  absurdities,  those  perversions  of  the  actual 
truth  into  its  very  opposite,  which  arise  not  from 
mere  insufficiency  of  knowledge,  but  from  a  moral 
incapacity  of  understanding  anything  unusually  com- 
plex in  character,  and  a  malevolent  predetermination 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE  9 

to  resist  evidence."  And  yet,  once  at  any  rate, 
Froude  himself  seems  to  have  had  some  inkling  of 
the  truth  which  Masson  insists  on,  for  in  one  place 
in  the  "  Life  of  Carlyle  "  he  speaks  of  Mrs.  Carlyle 
"  telling  stories  at  her  husband's  expense,  at  which 
he  laughed  himself  as  heartily  as  we  did," — a  be- 
haviour on  her  part  somewhat  difficult  to  reconcile 
with  her  condition  as  depicted  in  "  My  Relations 
with  Carlyle,"  as  a  poor,  dejected,  down-trodden 
woman,  whose  "  pale,  drawn,  suffering  face  "  haunted 
Froude  in  his  dreams.  It  was  "exquisitely  pain- 
ful," he  says,  to  see  this  bewitching  woman  suffering 
through  her  husband's  neglect  and  violence. 

Amongst  others  who  have  borne  generous 
testimony  to  the  cordial  and  affectionate  terms  on 
which  the  Carlyles  lived  may  be  named  Tennyson, 
G.  S.  Venables,  Mrs.  Oliphant,  John  Tyndall,  Sir 
Charles  Gavan  Duffy  and  A.  J.  Symington ;  but 
their  testimony,  strong  and  weighty  as  it  is,  and  that 
of  a  host  of  other  responsible  witnesses  who  might 
be  summoned,  cannot  elucidate  the  true  conjugal 
relations  of  Carlyle  and  his  wife  half  as  clearly  and 
convincingly  as  the  letters  which  they  wrote  to  each 
other,  during  the  forty  years  of  their  wedded  life. 
Enough  of  these  have  been  already  published  to 
put  it  beyond  a  shadow  of  a  doubt  that,  from  their 
first  acquaintance  to  the  end  of  their  days,  they  were 
united  by  almost  unbroken  trust  and  love  which 
only  deepened  as  the  end  drew  near.  Conscious 
that  these  letters,  if  referred  to,  must  reveal  the 
hollow  mockery  of  the  grim  Cheyne  Row  tragedy 
he  had  set  himself  to  compose,  Froude  attempts  to 


io         THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE 

discredit  them,  by  quoting  Mrs.  Carlyle  as  saying 
that  her  husband's  letters  were  written  for  his 
biographer.  Where  did  she  say  so  ?  Not  in  her 
replies  to  these  letters,  which  are  full  of  grateful 
acknowledgment  and  sympathetic  response.  The 
remark,  it  is  to  be  suggested,  must  have  been  made 
in  one  of  Froude's  imaginary  conversations  with 
her,  or  if  it  did  actually  fall  from  her  lips,  it  must 
have  been  ironical,  for  the  letters,  as  she  well  knew, 
came  from  the  fulness  of  the  writer's  heart,  and 
were  meant  for  no  eye  but  hers.  We  have  Froude's 
authority  for  it,  that  until  long  after  his  wife's  death 
Carlyle  was  resolved  that  no  express  biography  of 
him  should  be  written  ;  and  here  we  have  the  man 
who  tells  us  that  the  task  of  biography  was  ulti- 
mately confided  to  him,  insinuating  that  Carlyle 
in  his  familiar  correspondence  with  his  wife,  while 
denouncing  "  the  brute  of  a  world,"  was  posing  for 
future  generations.  But  Mrs.  Carlyle's  letters,  the 
sincerity  and  spontaneity  of  which  Froude  would  be 
the  last  to  impugn,  even  more  strikingly  than  her 
husband's,  bring  out  that  their  matrimonial  pathway, 
if  not  all  strewn  with  flowers  and  free  from  rough 
places,  was  on  the  whole  felicitous,  and  that  they 
never  parted  hands  while  journeying  along  it. 
They  had  their  little  differences  and  misunder- 
standings and  sometimes  their  sharp  encounters. 
What  married  pair  has  not  ?  What  man  of  genius 
and  his  wife  ever  escaped  them  ?  Who  has  proposed 
a  competition  for  the  Dunmow  Flitch  after  forty 
years  of  wedlock  ?  Mrs.  Carlyle  was  prone  to  take 
offence  and  could  speak  daggers.     Carlyle,  as  he 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         n 

said  of  his  wife's  grandfather,  had  a  hot  impatient 
temper,  breaking  out  into  fierce  flashes  as  of  light- 
ning, if  you  touched  him  the  wrong  way,  but  they 
were  flashes  only,  never  bolts.  But  on  the  whole 
they  were  happy  and  contented  with  each  other, 
and  it  is  impossible  now  to  determine  which  was 
more  to  blame  for  any  disagreements  that  varied 
the  monotony  of  their  existence.  Carlyle  has 
chivalrously  taken  most  of  the  blame  for  these  on 
himself,  but  hear  what  Jane  says  referring  to  one 
little  quarrel  that  occurred  on  one  occasion  between 
them.  "  Nothing  less  than  a  devil  (I  am  sure)  could 
have  tempted  me  to  torment  you  and  myself  as  I 
did  that  unblessed  day.  Woe  to  me,  then,  if  I  had 
had  any  other  than  the  most  constant  and  generous 
of  mortal  men  to  deal  with.  Blessings  on  your 
equanimity  and  magnanimity."  Even  the  idolatrous 
Miss  Jewsbury  admits  that  Jane  was  provoking  ; 
and  this  is  certain,  that  she  was  very  well  able  to 
take  care  of  herself,  and  that  Froude's  vision  of  her 
as  the  sweet,  forlorn,  submissive  spouse  of  an 
irritable,  inconsiderate  and  violent  husband,  is  either 
the  illusion  of  an  exuberant  imagination  or  the 
creation  of  a  malicious  caricaturist.  Mr.  Percy 
Fitzgerald  says  :  "  I  used  often  of  a  Sunday  to  go 
and  talk  with  the  late  Mrs.  Forster,  who  was  a 
shrewd  and  very  observant  lady.  She  met  all  her 
husband's  many  friends  and  knew  a  great  deal.  I 
remember  her  talking  much  of  the  Carlyles  and 
their  manage,  and  once  I  said — albeit  a  friend  and 
admirer  of  Thomas — that  she  must  have  had  a 
rough  time.     Mrs.  Forster  smiled,  and  said,  '  Don't 


12         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

you  believe  all  that !  She  was  rather  an  actress, 
and  liked  to  pose  as  a  martyr,  talking  of  her  suffer- 
ings and  getting  sympathy.  I  assure  you  he  was 
the  great  sufferer. '  "  Lady  Eastlake  wrote  in  her 
"  Letters  and  Memorials,"  "  Mrs.  Carlyle  interested 
me ;  she  is  lively  and  clever,  and  evidently  very 
happy." 

In  view  of  what  Froude  tells  us  as  to  the 
"  Niagaras  of  scorn  and  vituperation "  which 
Carlyle  poured  out  for  hours  together  in  his  wife's 
presence,  one  would  have  thought  that  it  would 
have  been  a  relief  to  her  to  be  left  alone  and  that 
she  must  have  thanked  Heaven  when  her  husband 
shut  himself  up  in  his  sound-proof  room.  But  not 
at  all.  Froude  will  not  have  it  so.  This  was  an 
additional  grievance.  "  She  was  very  much  alone." 
Carlyle,  whom  Froude  is  now,  with  tears  in  his 
eyes  and  a  tremor  in  his  voice,  unveiling  to  us  as  the 
thoroughly  bad  man  he  was,  was  not  only  violent  to 
his  wife  but  neglectful  of  her.  He  was  engrossed 
in  his  own  pursuits,  "  she  rarely  saw  him,  except 
at  meal-times.  She  sat  by  herself  in  her  drawing- 
room,  either  reading  or  entertaining  visitors  who 
bored  her  and  of  whom  she  dared  not  ask  him  to 
relieve  her."  She  was  a  sad,  solitary,  stricken 
woman ;  the  glaring  absurdity  of  all  which  may 
perhaps  be  best  demonstrated  by  recounting  the 
ordinary  routine  of  daily  life  at  Cheyne  Row. 

Carlyle  rose  at  7.30,  had  his  bath  and  went  out 
for  a  short  walk.  He  breakfasted  about  9,  and 
after  smoking  a  pipe,  reading  the  newspaper  (when 
he  took  one  in,  which  was  not  always),  and-convers- 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         13 

ing  with  his  wife,  he  retired  to  his  study.  When 
he  was  engaged  in  writing  anything,  he  worked 
steadily  till  1  or  1.30,  when  he  had  his  luncheon 
while  Mrs.  Carlyle  dined,  his  luncheon  being  light 
and  consisting  generally  of  a  cup  of  beef-tea  or  a 
biscuit  and  a  glass  of  sherry.  Then  he  went  out 
walking,  accompanied  by  his  wife  when  she  was 
able  to  walk.  When  he  had  a  horse,  he  rode  for 
two  hours  in  the  afternoon,  getting  in  an  hour 
before  dinner  which  was  generally  at  5  or  6,  but 
the  hour  was  frequently  changed.  Before  dinner 
he  was  joined  by  Mrs.  Carlyle,  who  talked  to  him 
and  told  him  the  news  of  the  day  while  he  was 
dining  and  while  he  lay  on  the  sofa,  when  the  meal 
was  over.  After  dinner,  when  they  were  not  invited 
out,  they  spent  the  whole  evening  together,  reading 
or  chatting  with  any  guests  who  chanced  to 
call.  This  was  the  general  routine,  but  when  he 
was  not  engaged  in  any  special  task,  Carlyle  rarely 
retired  to  his  study,  but  read  beside  his  wife.  And 
sometimes  even  when  he  was  writing  she  was  his 
companion.  He  says  :  "  Wife  and  I  sat  together 
in  the  library-room,  as  the  warmest,  all  the  time  I 
was  writing  '  Scott.'  " 

Now,  is  it  not  apparent  that  Froude  has  again 
attempted  to  mislead  his  readers  in  representing 
Mrs.  Carlyle  as  being  left  much  alone  by  a  callous 
husband,  careful  about  his  own  interests  and  nought 
else,  and  that  as  a  matter  of  fact  she  had  more 
of  her  husband's  society  than  married  ladies  of  a 
certain  age  generally  have  ?  Beyond  the  riding 
exercise,  which  he  took  with  a  view  to  the   main- 


i4        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

tenance  of  his  working  power,  on  which  his  bread 
depended,  Carlyle  had  no  pursuits  or  amusements 
apart  from  his  home.  He  was  not  a  club-man  or 
sportsman  or  billiard-player.  He  spent  his  leisure 
at  his  own  fireside  with  his  wife  and  friends,  and  it 
was  his  wife's  own  choice  if  she  did  not  accompany 
him  on  his  very  occasional  excursions  into  society  at 
Bath  House  or  Addiscombe.  His  visits  to  Scot- 
land were  made  that  he  might  see  his  kindred  or 
recover  his  health,  and  during  them  he  wrote  to  his 
wife  daily,  not  laconic  notes,  but  richly  effusive 
letters,  which  she  so  hungered  for,  that  she  had  an 
hysterical  attack  if  the  post  failed  to  bring  one. 
What  modern  husband  does  as  much  ?  How  many 
twentieth-century  wives  can  boast  of  as  much 
uxorial  devotion  ? 

Mrs.  Carlyle  was  no  Mariana  in  a  Moated 
Grange,  dreary  and  deserted,  but  a  highly  appre- 
ciated wife,  whose  complaint  was  that  she  had  too 
much  and  not  too  little  society.  "  So  long  as  I  am 
in  what  the  French  call  '  my  room  of  reception,' ' 
she  says,  "  it  never  occurs  to  me  to  feel  lonely." 
"It  is  odd,"  she  remarks,  in  another  place,  "what 
notions  men  have  of  the  scantiness  of  a  woman's 
resources.  They  do  not  find  it  anything  out  of 
nature  that  they  should  exist  by  themselves,  but  a 
woman  must  always  be  borne  about  on  some- 
body's shoulders,  and  dandled  or  chirped  to,  or 
it  is  supposed  she  will  fall  into  the  blackest 
melancholy  !  "  "  I  have  as  much  society  as  I  like, 
but  I  prefer  none  when  I  am  ill." 

But  Mrs.  Carlyle  had  other  interests  and  enjoy- 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         15 

ments  beyond  those  which  society  afforded.  She 
keenly  relished  the  management  of  her  little  house- 
hold and  the  conquest  of  those  practical  problems 
which,  for  many  years,  their  limited  means  made 
difficult  of  solution.  She  had  been  brought  up  to 
take  part  in  household  work ;  she  revelled  in 
economic  contrivances,  and  even  her  "earthquakes" 
or  annual  cleanings  brought  her  a  grim  satisfaction. 
But  here  again  the  lugubrious  Froude  shakes  his 
head.  She  was  "  a  household  drudge,"  quoth  he, 
and  in  saying  that  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle  " 
he  is  merely  disinterring  those  old  misinterpretations 
of  his  which  were  killed  and  buried  long  ago. 

It  was  in  connection  with  the  life  at  Craigen- 
puttock  that  Froude  first  made  this  charge.  He 
depicted  that  as  one  round  of  menial  drudgery  for 
Mrs.  Carlyle,  unsolaced  by  more  than  an  occasional 
word  of  encouragement,  sympathy,  or  compassion 
from  her  husband.  "  Every  household  duty  fell  upon 
her,  either  directly,  or  in  supplying  the  shortcomings 
of  a  Scotch  maid-of-all-work  She  had  to  cook,  to 
sew,  to  scour,  to  clean ;  to  gallop  down  alone  to 
Dumfries  if  anything  was  wanted ;  to  keep  the 
house,  and  even  on  occasions  to  milk  the  cows." 
The  story  of  the  hard  time  this  poor  woman  had 
to  pass  at  Craigenputtock,  Froude  derived  from 
Miss  Geraldine  Jewsbury's  recollection,  and  he  had 
the  effrontery  to  adhere  to  it  and  to  introduce  it 
into  the  "  Early  Life  "  after  he  had  himself  published 
Carlyle's  denial  of  it,  generally  and  in  detail. 

11  Geraldine's    Craigenputtock    stories,"    Carlyle 
wrote,    "  are  more  mythical    than  any  of  the   rest. 


16        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

Each  consists  of  two  or  three  in  confused  exaggerated 
state  rolled  with  new  confusion  into  one,"  and  then 
he  goes  on  to  show  that  his  wife's  participation  in 
any    of    the    menial    occupations    enumerated    by 
Froude  must  have  had  a  spice  of  frolic  or  adventure 
in  it,  as  there  were  a  servant  and  milk-maid  and 
farm  men  at  call,  zealous  to  help  the  young  couple. 
He  states  explicitly  that  the  happiest  and  whole- 
somest  days  of  their  married  life  were  these  seven 
years  spent  at  Craigenputtock,  where  his  helpmate 
made  the  desert  blossom  and  converted  into  a  fairy 
palace  "  the  wild  moorland  home  of  the  poor  man." 
And  in  all  this  he  is  fully  borne  out  by  the  testimony 
of  that  helpmate  herself.     Her  letters,  dated  from 
Craigenputtock,  are  bright  as  the  unpolluted  sun- 
light  on    the  mountain,  breezy  as  the  atmosphere 
that   undulated   around   her  ;  lucent  and   hopefully 
babbling  like  the  streams  that  hurried  to  the  valley 
below.       And    more    than    that,    they   teem    with 
expressions  of  joyous  satisfaction  with  her  lot,  and 
contain  direct  contradictions  of  every  one  of  Froude's 
allegations.    To  "  this  dreariest  spot  in  all  the  British 
dominions,"  as   Froude,  with  pitiable  topographical 
insensibility,  described  it,   she  was   glad   to  return 
from  Edinburgh  and  from  Templand  when  visiting 
her  mother ;  and  from  it,  after  four  years'  experience 
of  it,  she  wrote  to  Miss  Eliza  Miles,  "  For  my  part 
I   am    very  content.     I    have   everything  here  my 
heart    desires    that    I    could   have   anywhere   else, 
except   society,  and    even    that    deprivation  is    not 
wholly  an  evil.  .  .  .   My  husband  is  as  good  com- 
pany as  reasonable  mortal  could  desire.     Every  fair 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         17 

morning  we  ride  on  horseback  for  an  hour  before 
breakfast.  .  .  .  Then  we  eat  such  a  surprising 
breakfast  of  home-baked  bread  and  eggs,  etc.,  etc., 
as  might  incite  anyone  that  had  breakfasted  so  long 
in  London  to  write  a  pastoral.  Then  Carlyle  takes 
to  his  writing,  while  I,  like  Eve,  'studious  of  house- 
hold good,'  inspect  my  house,  my  garden,  my  live 
stock,  gather  flowers  for  my  drawing-room,  and 
lapfuls  of  eggs  and  finally  betake  myself  also  to 
writing,  or  reading,  or  mending,  or  whatever  work 
seems  fittest.  After  dinner,  and  only  then,  I  lie  on 
the  sofa,  and  (to  my  shame  be  it  spoken)  sometimes 
sleep,  but  oftenest  dream  waking.  ...  In  the 
evening  I  walk  on  the  moor  and  read.  Such  is 
my  life."  And  one  is  tempted  to  ask  what  was 
wrong  with  it,  in  the  case  of  a  young  Scotchwoman, 
reared  in  the  frugal  home  of  a  country  doctor, 
whose  husband  was  earning  his  living  by  his  pen, 
and,  as  she  even  then  knew,  laying  the  foundation 
of  a  great  reputation  ? 

To  Miss  Stodart  Mrs.  Carlyle  wrote :  "  Indeed, 
Craigenputtock  is  no  such  frightful  place  as  the 
people  call  it.  ...  I  read  and  work  and  talk  with 
my  husband  and  am  never  weary.  I  ride  over  to 
Templand  [to  see  her  mother].  Grace  Macdonald 
[that  is  Froude's  Scotch  maid-of-all-work  with  her 
short-comings]  is  turning  out  a  most  excellent 
servant,  and  seems  the  carefullest,  honestest  creature 
living."  ..."  The  fact  is  I  have  no  delight  in 
cows,  and  have  happily  no  concern  with  them,"  and 
so  on.  Every  statement  that  Froude  made  about 
the  Craigenputtock  life  has  been  specifically  traversed 


18         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

by  Mrs.  Carlyle  herself,  and  yet,  knowing  this,  he 
ventured  to  put  them  forward,  and  although  his 
attention  was  called  to  their  incorrectness  he  never 
had  the  grace  to  withdraw  them.  As  was  her 
manner,  Mrs.  Carlyle  often  dilates  with  mock  and 
merry  consternation  on  her  housewife  difficulties, 
and  amplifies  into  haystacks  the  molehills  that 
obstructed  her  path,  but  no  one  with  a  milligram  of 
humour  could  take  these  sallies  seriously.  Looking 
back  on  these  old  times  when  she  was  ill  and 
depressed,  the  far  slanting  shadows  may  have 
darkened  them  and  caused  her  to  speak  of  them 
with  repugnance  and  gloom,  but  the  chronicles 
she  has  left  of  them  prove  that  they  were  full  of 
healthful  activity  and  tranquil  happiness. 

Froude  does  not  refer  to  the  Craigenputtock 
stories  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  but  he  still 
represents  Mrs.  Carlyle  as  a  household  drudge  in 
London,  thus  repeating  a  thrice-refuted  fallacy. 
The  care  and  direction  of  her  small  establishment 
was  no  heavy  burden  to  her,  and  to  have  attempted 
to  relieve  her  of  it  would  have  been  to  give  her 
pain.  "  Perfection  of  housekeeping  was,"  said 
Carlyle,  "  her  clear  and  speedy  attainment,"  and  as 
a  woman  takes  pride  in  doing  that  which  she  can 
do  well,  Mrs.  Carlyle  gloried  in  her  marketings, 
and  mendings,  and  lustrations,  and  recounts,  with 
exquisite  burlesque,  her  experiences  of  her  domestic 
servants.  That  she  had  for  many  years  only  one 
servant  was  her  own  choice  ;  her  husband  urged 
her  to  have  two,  but  she  long  resisted  his  entreaties, 
and  when  at  last  she  yielded  to  them  she  was  miser- 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         19 

able  until  the  second  servant  was  got  out  of  the 
house.  "  So  I  am  now  mistress  of  two  servants," 
she  wrote,  "  and  ready  to  hang  myself.  Seriously 
the  change  is  nearly  intolerable  to  me,  though  both 
these  women  are  good  servants,  as  servants  go.  But 
the  twoness  !  The  much  ado  about  nothing!"  In 
all  domestic  affairs  it  was  she  and  not  her  husband 
who  restricted  expenditure.  "  With  great  diffi- 
culty," he  writes,  "  I  had  got  her  induced,  persuaded, 
commanded  to  take  two  weekly  drives  in  a  hired 
brougham  (more  difficulty  in  persuading  you  to  go 
into  any  expense  than  other  men  have  to  persuade 
their  wives  to  keep  out  of  it)."  Instead  of  being 
"a  household  drudge,"  she  had  often  not  enough  to 
do,  and  it  might  have  been  an  advantage  to  her  if, 
in  the  absence  of  children,  she  had  taken  up  some 
definite  employment.  For  serious  literary  work  she 
had  not  sufficient  persistence.  The  letters  were 
brilliant  spurts,  but  a  continuous  flow  she  could  not 
maintain,  although  her  husband  gave  her  every 
encouragement.  In  1842  he  wrote  to  her:  "My 
prayer  is  and  has  always  been  that  you  would  rouse 
up  the  fine  faculties  that  are  yours,  into  some  course 
of  real  true  work  which  you  felt  to  be  worthy  of 
them  and  of  you.  ...  I  will  never  give  up  the 
hope  to  see  you  adequately  busy  with  your  whole 
mind,  discovering,  as  all  human  beings  may  do,  that 
even  in  the  grimmest  rocky  wilderness  of  existence 
there  are  blessed  well-springs,  there  is  an  ever- 
lasting guiding  star.  Courage,  my  poor  little 
Jeannie."  In  July  of  the  same  year  he  wrote  to 
his  brother  Alick  :  "Jane  is  still  altogether  weakly, 

c  2 


20        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

but  she  grows  better ;  time  alone  can  alleviate  that 
kind  of  sorrow  [the  loss  of  her  mother].  She  is 
left  very  lonely  in  this  world  now ;  her  kindred 
mostly  gone  ;  very  few  of  the  people  vaguely  called 
'  friends '  worth  much  to  her!  It  would  be  better 
for  her  also  if  she  had  more  imperative  employment 
to  follow  :  a  small  portion  of  the  day  suffices  for  all 
her  obligatory  work,  and  the  rest,  when  she  cannot 
seek  work  for  herself,  is  apt  to  be  spent  in  sorrowful 
reflexions." 

Having  shown  to  his  own  satisfaction  that  Mrs. 
Carlyle  was  on  the  one  hand  bullied  by  her  husband 
and  on  the  other  neglected,  Froude  next  proceeds 
to  assure  us  that  she  was  sarcastic  when  she  spoke 
of  him,  "  a  curious  blending  of  pity,  contempt,  and 
other  feelings."  And  no  wonder,  if  Froude  is  right ; 
but  in  a  matter  like  this  we  cannot  entirely  depend 
on  his  ipse  dixit,  and,  until  some  one  can  point  out  a 
single  utterance  in  any  one  of  Mrs.  Carlyle's  writings 
betokening  pity  or  contempt  of  her  husband,  we 
shall  believe  that  Froude  is  once  more  indulging  in 
one  of  his  imaginary  conversations.  She  had  a 
sharp  tongue :  angry  words  about  her  husband 
sometimes  escaped  her.  He  and  she  now  and 
then  no  doubt  exchanged  taunts  in  private,  and 
in  company  they  chaffed  and  quizzed  each  other 
unmercifully,  but  that  she  ever  expressed  pity  and 
contempt  for  him,  to  one  of  his  professing  friends, 
behind  his  back,  is  unbelievable.  Why,  pride  in  him 
was  the  mainstay  of  her  life.  "  Thanks,  Darling," 
writes  Carlyle,  "  for  your  shining  words  and  acts, 
which  were  continual  in  my  eyes,  and  in  no  other 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         21 

mortal's.  Worthless  I  was  your  divinity ;  wrapt  in 
your  perpetual  love  of  me  and  pride  in  me,  in 
defiance  of  all  men  and  things."  "  She  had  from  an 
early  period,"  wrote  her  sorrowing  husband,  "  formed 
her  own  little  opinion  of  me  (what  an  Eldorado  to  me 
blind,  ungrateful,  condemnable,  and  heavy-laden,  and 
crushed  down  into  blindness  by  great  misery,  as  I 
oftenest  was),  and  she  never  flinched  from  it  for  an 
instant,  I  think,  or  cared  or  counted  what  the  world 
said  to  the  contrary  (very  brave,  magnanimous,  and 
noble  truly  she  was  in  all  this),  but  to  have  the  world 
confirm  her  in  it  was  always  a  sensible  pleasure 
which  she  took  no  pains  to  hide  especially  from 
me."  She  was  an  honourable  woman  and  a  faithful 
wife,  and  could  not  have  been  guilty  of  the  treach- 
ery that  Froude  ascribes  to  her.  In  1846,  after 
twenty  years  of  married  life,  when  all  her  husband's 
faults  and  weaknesses  must  have  been  known  to  her, 
she  wrote  to  him  :  "I  have  grown  to  love  you  the 
longer,  the  more,  till  now  you  are  grown  to  be  the 
whole  universe,  God,  everything  to  me,  but  in  pro- 
portion as  I  have  got  to  know  all  your  importance 
to  me,  I  have  been  losing  faith  in  my  importance  to 
you."     Is  this  pity  and  contempt  ? 

It  was  necessary  to  show  some  ground  for  Mrs. 
Carlyle's  alleged  pity  and  contempt  of  her  husband, 
and  so  Froude  reduces  him  to  the  rank  of  a 
miserable  egotist  and  valetudinarian.  He  suffered, 
he  admits,  from  dyspepsia  and  want  of  sleep,  but 
whereas  his  wife  "  was  expected  to  bear  her  trouble 
in  patience,  and  received  hints  on  the  duty  of 
submission  if  she  spoke  impatiently,  he  was  never 


22        THE   NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE 

more  eloquent  than  in  speaking  of  his  own  crosses." 
He  himself,  Froude  opines,  "  had  really  a  vigorous 
constitution.  He  never  had  a  day's  serious  illness. 
He  used  to  ride  and  walk  in  the  wildest  weather." 
Carlyle  was  therefore  in  point  of  fact  a  malingerer, 
or  a  robust  invalid,  selfishly  and  querulously  vexing 
those  around  him  by  his  unmanly  appeals  for 
sympathy  in  his  purely  imaginary  ailments.  Hypo- 
chondria in  Froude's  eyes  is  a  sort  of  sick-robe,  put 
on  for  toilet  purposes,  and  that  can  be  laid  aside  at 
pleasure.  He  never  himself  suffered  from  it,  but  he 
ought  to  have  remembered,  even  in  his  eagerness 
to  prove  Carlyle  an  impostor,  that  many  other  men 
of  genius  have  suffered  in  exactly  the  same  way. 
Hypochondria  is,  indeed,  a  frequent  accompaniment 
of  great  intellectual  activity.  That  Carlyle  had 
naturally  a  fine  constitution  may  be  inferred  from 
the  age  to  which  he  lived,  but  length  of  days  is  not 
incompatible  with  a  suffering  existence.  The  active 
exercise  he  took  was  essential  to  alleviate  the 
irritability  of  the  nervous  system,  which  his  strenuous 
work  induced,  and  he  was,  from  first  to  last,  one  of 
those  workers  to  whom  production  was  not  facile 
but  arduous  and  exhausting.  Hypochondria  is  a 
terribly  real  disease ;  often,  as  all  medical  men 
know,  involving  more  distress  than  graver  and  more 
mortal  maladies.  Dyspepsia  and  insomnia  com- 
bined, as  literary  men  do  not  require  to  be  told, 
may  prove  afflictive  and  incapacitating  to  an  extra- 
ordinary degree.  They  have  driven  many  a  man 
of  rare  ability  and  promise  to  madness  and  suicide, 
and  that  Carlyle  did  not  succumb  to  them,  in  the 


THE    NEMESIS    OF   FROUDE         23 

concentrated  form  and  inveterate  type,  in  which 
they  attacked  him,  is  evidence  of  his  fortitude  and 
will  power.  From  his  twenty-fourth  year  until  his 
work  was  laid  aside  they  never  left  him  alone,  and 
there  can  be  no  question  that  they  often  caused  him 
what  he  called  torture  and  purgatorial  pains.  The 
dyspepsia  was  set  up  by  the  ill-cooked  and  somewhat 
scanty  food  supplied  to  him  when  he  was  living 
in  lodgings  in  Edinburgh  on  15^.  a  week,  and  in 
Kirkcaldy  on  £60  a  year,  out  of  which  he  helped 
his  family,  and  bravely  working  his  way,  and  the 
insomnia  followed  in  its  train,  when  he  began  to 
overtax  his  brain.  Froude  makes  light  of  Carlyle's 
sufferings,  and  in  order  to  bring  him  into  contempt 
hints  that  he  roared  loudly  when  little  hurt.  The 
many  doctors  he  consulted  did  not  think  so,  nor  did 
his  wife,  who  best  knew  what  he  endured,  and  was 
unflagging  in  her  sympathy  and  efforts  to  devise 
alleviations.  He  grasped  at  all  feasible  remedies, 
and  even  for  some  years  gave  up  smoking,  his  chief 
solace,  in  the  hope  of  obtaining  relief. 

But  while  Carlyle  was  in  Froude's  view  sham- 
ming, Mrs.  Carlyle  was  really  suffering  poignantly 
from  the  effects  of  his  cruel  and  inconsiderate  treat- 
ment of  her.  "  In  1862,"  says  Froude,  "her  health 
finally  broke  down,  and  there  came  on  that  strange 
illness  which  doctors  failed  to  understand,  or  if  they 
understood  it,  they  did  not  venture  to  speak  plainly  " 
— a  sentence  which  includes  two  erroneous  state- 
ments and  an  unwarrantable  reflexion  on  Mrs. 
Carlyle's  medical  advisers.  The  final  breakdown 
in   her  health   occurred  not   in    1862,  but  in   1863, 


24        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

and  was  the  immediate  result  of  shock  and  injury 
sustained  in  a  serious  street  accident  in  the  City. 
Her  illness  was  not  at  all  strange,  and  was  well 
understood  by  her  doctors  as  the  culmination  of 
a  nervous  affection,  the  seeds  of  which  were 
born  with  her,  fostered  by  her  bringing  up,  and 
brought  to  full  growth  and  fruition  by  the  cir- 
cumstances of  her  life.  Her  doctors  would  not 
have  hesitated  to  speak  plainly  had  they  agreed 
with  Froude  that  it  was  her  husband's  "  wild 
irritability  "  that  had  shattered  her  nerves ;  and  how 
utterly  reckless  Froude's  assertions  are  may  be 
realised  when  we  read  a  few  lines  further  on  in  his 
pamphlet  that  these  doctors  whom  he  had  just 
accused  of  poltroonery  "  insisted  as  a  first  necessity 
on  her  separation  from  him  [her  husband],  the 
constant  agitation  of  his  presence  and  the  equally 
constant  provocation  which  his  forgetfulness  and 
preoccupation  made  incessant  in  spite  of  efforts, 
taking  away  all  hope  of  amendment  while  the  cause 
remained  " — a  statement  which  is  equally  erroneous 
with  all  the  rest.  The  doctors  never  insisted 
on  Mrs.  Carlyle's  separation  from  her  husband, 
and  never  attributed  her  condition  to  his  irri- 
tability. "  By  everybody  it  had  been  agreed," 
wrote  Carlyle,  "that  a  change  of  scene  (as  usual 
when  all  else  has  failed)  was  the  thing  to  be 
looked  to  :  St.  Leonard's  as  soon  as  the  weather  will 
permit,  said  Dr.  Quain  and  everybody,  especially 
Dr.  Blakiston  ; "  and  it  is  remarkable  that  if  the 
doctors  regarded  separation  from  her  husband  "  as 
a   first    necessity,"  she   was    not    removed    to    St. 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         25 

Leonard's  until   March,   1864,  although  her  illness 
began   in  October,    1863.     That  Mrs.   Carlyle  did 
not  regard  separation  from  her  husband  as  either 
necessary  or  healing  may  be  gathered  from  her  ten- 
derly affectionate  letters  to  him  from  St.  Leonard's. 
No  sooner  had  she  arrived  there  than  she  wrote  to 
him,  "  Oh,  I  would  like  you  beside  me  !     I  am  so 
terribly  alone  /  "     "  She  had  been  again  and  again 
given  up,"  says  Froude,  blundering  on  ;  but  nobody 
ever  gave  her  up,  and  she  died  ultimately,  not  from 
the  nervous  malady  from  which  she  was  suffering  in 
1863,  but  from  heart  failure.     She  was,  of  course, 
despondent  about  herself,  but  that  was  an  inevitable 
part  of  her  illness,  and  the  anxiety  of  her  doctors 
was  connected  more  with  her  mental  than  with  her 
physical  state.      She  said  of  herself,   "The  actual 
suffering   if  cleared    of    the    aggravations    of    the 
Imagination    would    be    nothing    to    make   a    fuss 
about."     "  Suddenly,  as  if  from  the  grave,"  exclaims 
Froude,  "  she  came  back  ;  "  but  the  recovery  which 
began  in  July,  1864,  was  very  gradual,  and  was  not 
complete  until  October  of  that  year,  if  then.     "  She 
still  mocked  to  me,"  goes  on  Froude,  "about  him 
[Carlyle],  and  the  old  resentment  was  there,  though 
it  showed  itself  less."     If  she  did  so,  she  must  have 
been  the  most  deceitful  of  women,  for  at  this  very 
time  she  was  writing  to  her  friends  pouring  forth 
her  gratitude  to  her  husband  for  his  solicitous  care 
of  her.      "  I   cannot  tell  you,"  she  wrote  to  Mrs. 
Austin,  "  how  kind  and  good  Mr.  Carlyle  is  !  "    "  The 
injury  had  gone  too  deep,"  proceeds  the  sepulchral 
Froude.  .  .  .   "Her  nerves  had  been  so  shaken  by 


26         THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

her  many  years  of  suffering  that  some  singular 
disease  had  developed  itself,  I  believe,  in  her 
spine."  But  Mrs.  Carlyle  never  had  anything  the 
matter  with  her  spine,  her  nervous  disease  was  in 
no  degree  singular,  and  had  in  it  in  its  later  stages 
a  large  element  of  hysteria,  and  she  died,  as  we 
have  said,  of  heart  failure,  from  which  she  had 
suffered  at  intervals  for  many  years. 

No  one  can,  we  think,  read  Froude's  account 
of  Mrs.  Carlyle's  illness  in  the  light  of  the  expla- 
nations now  given,  without  feeling  that  it  was 
throughout  calculated  to  create  prejudice  against 
her  husband,  whom  he  almost  accuses  of  having 
caused  her  death.  No  one  can  read  it  and  realise 
that  it  is  typical  of  Froude's  treatment  of  Carlyle 
in  other  matters,  without  understanding  the  indig- 
nation that  his  elaborate  fabrications  have  induced 
amongst  Carlyle's  friends. 

Froude  set  himself,  in  writing  "  My  Relations 
with  Carlyle,"  to  improve  on  the  mixed  picture  of 
the  Life  and  to  exhibit  him  as  a  hard,  heartless  man 
with  no  redeeming  traits  of  character.  "  He  made 
little  of  other  people's  sufferings,"  he  says.  But  is 
this  true  ?  "  Miss  Martineau,"  says  Professor 
Masson,  "  in  her  description  of  Carlyle  from  her 
own  knowledge,  actually  singled  out  for  special 
note,  as  that  in  his  character  which  distinguished 
him  most  from  all  other  men  she  had  seen,  his 
enormous  power  of  sympathy.  It  was  a  most 
correct  observation.  No  one  who  knew  Carlyle 
but  must  have  noted  how  instantaneously  he  was 
affected  or  even  agitated  by  any  case  of  difficulty 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         27 

or  distress  in  which  he  was  consulted  or  that  was 
casually  brought  to  his  cognisance,  and  with  what 
restless  curiosity  and  exactitude  he  would  inquire 
into  all  the  particulars,  till  he  had  conceived  the 
case  thoroughly,  and,  as  it  were,  taken  the  whole 
pain  of  it  into  himself.  The  practical  procedure,  if 
any  was  possible,  was  sure  to  follow."  This  very 
Froude,  who  declares  that  Carlyle  made  little  of 
other  people's  sufferings,  had  written  elsewhere — he 
must  have  forgotten  it — "  I  had  not  expected  so 
much  detailed  compassion  in  little  things.  I  found 
that  personal  sympathy  with  suffering  lay  at  the 
root  of  all  his  thoughts  ;  and  that  attention  to  little 
things  was  as  characteristic  of  his  conduct  as  it  was 
of  his  intellect."  In  another  place  he  wrote  — 
"  No  one,  however,  can  read  these  letters  [his 
letters  to  his  wife]  or  ten  thousand  like  them  with- 
out recognising  the  affectionate  tenderness  which 
lay  at  the  bottom  of  his  nature."  No  one  can  recall 
the  incidents  of  Carlyle's  career,  his  contributions  to 
one  brother's  education  and  to  another's  farming, 
when  he  was  still  poor  and  struggling,  his  frequent 
little  gifts  to  his  father  and  mother,  his  never- 
forgotten  birthday  presents  to  his  wife,  his  exertions 
on  behalf  of  the  Misses  Lowes,  and  scores  of  like 
acts,  without  recognising  that  he  was  a  thoughtful, 
sympathetic  and  large-hearted  man,  and  that  Froude 
has  cruelly  maligned  him.  How  did  this  man,  who 
was,  Froude  tells  us,  in  the  habit  of  "  bursting  into 
violence  at  the  smallest  and  absurdest  provoca- 
tions," comport  himself  at  that  terrible  juncture 
when  John  Stuart  Mill  came  to  announce  the  burn- 


28         THE    NEMESIS    OF   FROUDE 

ing  of  the  first  volume  of  the  manuscript  of  the 
11  French  Revolution  "  ?  He  never  lost  his  com- 
posure, and  the  first  words  he  spoke  to  his  wife 
when  Mill  was  gone  were,  "Well,  Mill,  poor  fellow, 
is  very  miserable.  We  must  try  to  keep  from  him 
how  serious  the  loss  is  to  us." 

But  not  only,  Froude  would  have  us  believe,  did 
Carlyle  shatter  his  wife's  nerves  and  shorten  her 
days,  he  also  made  cruel  shipwreck  of  her  faith. 
"  She  had  accepted,"  he  writes,  "  the  destructive 
part  of  his  opinions  like  so  many  others,  but  he  had 
failed  to  satisfy  her  that  he  knew  where  positive 
truth  lay.  He  had  taken  from  her,  as  she  mourn- 
fully said  [when  did  she  say  it  or  where  ?  save  in 
one  of  Froude's  imaginary  conversations],  the  creed 
in  which  she  had  been  bred,  but  he  had  been  unable 
to  put  anything  in  place  of  it.  She  believed  nothing. 
On  the  spiritual  side  of  things  her  mind  was  a  per- 
fect blank  ;  she  looked  into  her  own  heart  and  into 
the  world  beyond  her,  and  it  was  all  void  and 
desert ;  there  was  no  word  of  consolation,  no  word 
of  hope."  It  is  strange  that  these  teachings  of 
Carlyle,  which  produced  on  Froude  what  he  calls 
"  a  conviction  of  sin,"  which  taught  him  the  intense 
seriousness  of  life,  and  awakened  him  to  the  mean- 
ing of  duty  and  the  overpowering  obligation  to  do 
it,  and  "  saved  him  from  atheism,"  as  he  has  in- 
formed us,  thus  enlarging  and  bracing  his  existence, 
should  have  had  such  an  opposite  effect  on  Mrs. 
Carlyle,  rendering  her  hopeless  and  void.  One 
would  have  supposed  that  this  thoughtful  woman, 
the  most  brilliant  and  interesting  Froude  had  ever 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         29 

fallen  in  with,  would  have  been  influenced  by 
Carlyle's  doctrine  very  much  as  Froude  himself 
was.  But  not  so.  What  was  his  meat  was  her 
poison.  Froude  was  redeemed,  Mrs.  Carlyle  was 
cast  into  outer  darkness. 

Long  before  her  marriage,  Miss  Jane  Welsh  had 
emancipated  herself  from  the  creed  in  which  she  was 
brought  up.     When  she  was  still  a  school-girl  at 
Haddington,  so  Froude  tells  us,  "  her  tutor  intro- 
duced her  to  '  Virgil,'  and  the  effect  of  '  Virgil '  and 
her  other  Latin  studies  was  to  change  her  religion 
and  make  her  into  a  sort  of  Pagan."     And  a  sort  of 
Pagan  she  ever  afterwards  remained.     Her  words 
were  as  follows  :  "  That  my  Latin  studies  pursued  far 
too  closely  and  strenuously  for  so  young  a  girl  had 
changed  my  religion,  if  I  could  be  said  to  have  one, 
is  strictly  true,  and  it  wasn't  my  religion  only  that 
they  influenced,  my  whole  being  was  imbued  with 
them."     In  giving  this  passage  Froude  has  omitted, 
surely,  we  are  entitled  to  say,  has  curiously  omitted, 
the  words,  "  if  I  could  be  said  to  have  one,"  i.e.,  a 
religion.     The  letter  which  she  wrote  to  her  grand- 
mother, on  the  occasion  of  her  father's  death  when  she 
was  eighteen  years  old,  is  a  clear  proof  that  she  had 
then  parted  company  with  revealed  truth,  as  taught 
in   the   Church    of    Scotland.      She    bows   to   the 
chastisement   of  the    Divine  Power,    and  acknow- 
ledges that  the  ways  of  the  Almighty  are  mysterious  ; 
but  there  is  not,  in  that  letter,  one  ray  of  Christian 
faith  or  hope.     No  believing   Scottish  girl  of  the 
period  could    possibly    have  written  such    a   letter 
under  such  circumstances. 


30        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

That  Miss  Welsh  had  shed  whatever  faith  she 
once  possessed  and  had  developed  some  of  the 
unlovely  traits  of  character  which  so  often  accom- 
pany that  disrobement  in  a  woman,  long  before  she 
fell  under  the  influence  of  Carlyle,  is  abundantly 
clear.  In  1821,  that  is  to  say  in  the  year  in  which 
Carlyle  was  introduced  to  her,  we  find  Edward 
Irving  expressing  serious  anxiety  as  to  her  spiritual 
state.  He  had  laboured  with  all  his  energies  to 
lead  his  pupil  to  think  of  Christianity  as  he  did 
himself,  but  he  had  serious  misgivings  respecting 
her.  "  She  contemplates,"  he  wrote  to  Carlyle,  "  the 
inferiority  of  others  rather  from  the  point  of  ridicule 
and  contempt  than  from  that  of  commiseration  and 
relief ;  and  by  so  doing  she  not  only  leaves  objects 
in  distress  and  loses  the  luxury  of  doing  good,  but 
she  contracts  in  her  own  mind  a  degree  of  coldness 
and  bitterness  which  suits  ill  with  my  conception  of 
female  character  and  a  female's  station  in  society. 
...  I  could  like  to  see  her  surrounded  with  a  more 
sober  set  of  companions  than  Rousseau  and  Byron 
and  such  like  ...  I  fear  Jane  has  already  dipped 
too  deep  into  that  spring,  so  that  unless  some  more 
solid  food  be  afforded  I  fear  she  will  escape  alto- 
gether out  of  the  region  of  my  sympathies  and  the 
sympathies  of  honest  home-bred  men.  In  these 
feelings  I  know  you  will  join  me."  In  1822,  Irving 
wrote  to  Miss  Welsh  herself,  "  Now  it  does  give  me 
great  hope  that  God  will  yet  be  pleased  to  open 
your  mind  to  the  highest  of  all  knowledge,  the 
knowledge  of  his  Blessed  Son,  and  give  therewith 
the  highest  of  all  delights,  of  being  like  his  Son  in 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         31 

character  and  in  destiny,  when  I  see  you  not 
alienated  from  men  of  genius  by  their  being  men  of 
religion,  but  attracted  to  them  I  think  rather  the 
more.  I  could  wish  indeed — and  forgive  me  when 
I  make  free  to  suggest  it — that  your  mind  were  less 
anxious  for  the  distinction  of  being  enrolled  amongst 
those  whom  this  world  has  crowned  with  their 
admiration,  than  among  those  whom  God  has 
crowned  with  his  approval.  .  .  .  Oh,  how  few  I 
find,  my  dear  Jane,  hardly  have  I  found  a  single 
one,  who  can  stand  the  intoxication  of  high  talents 
or  resist  presuming  to  lord  it  over  others." 

In  Carlyle's  numerous  letters  to  Miss  Welsh, 
from  his  introduction  to  her  in  1821  till  their 
marriage  in  1826,  there  is  not  a  sentence  calculated 
to  inspire  doubt,  while  there  is  much  that  ought  to 
have  exalted  her  moral  nature,  and  after  marriage 
his  creed  might  have  saved  her  from  blank  scepticism 
had  she  chosen  to  accept  it.  But  she  was  a  worldly 
little  woman,  and  her  Godlessness,  until  she  was  by 
severe  illness  brough  back  to  some  semblance  of 
piety,  was  perhaps  a  rather  disenchanting  element 
in  her  character.  Froude  would  have  us  believe 
that  in  relation  to  his  wife  Carlyle  was  an  icono- 
clast and  a  faith  wrecker,  an  atheist  of  the  most 
blatant  type.  But  what  are  the  facts — the  facts  of 
things — as  Carlyle  would  have  had  it  ?  He  was 
a  fervid  Theist,  proclaiming  the  existence  of  God 
with  as  much  earnestness  and  insistence  as  the 
inspired  camel-driver  of  Arabia.  He  was  an 
intensely  religious  man,  who,  while  rejecting 
theologic   dogmas   and   formulas,    accepted    Chris- 


%2        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 


o 


tianity  in  its  ethical  aspects,  and  was  never  tired 
of  preaching  truth,  honesty,  temperance,  mercy, 
humility  and  God-fearing.  He  had  the  deepest 
reverence  for  the  life  and  character  of  Christ  as 
represented  in  the  Gospels.  He  retained  a  con- 
viction of  the  efficacy  of  prayer,  and  had  a  lurking 
belief  in  a  Particular  Providence,  and  a  clinging  hope 
of  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  When  stricken  in 
years  he  found  that  expression  was  best  given  to  his 
spiritual  needs  in  Pope's  verses  in  the  "  Universal 
Prayer  " — 

"  Father  of  all !   in  every  age, 
In  every  clime,  adored, 
By  saint,  by  savage  and  by  sage 
Jehovah  Jove  or  Lord ! 

Thou  Great  First-Cause,  least  understood, 

Who  all  my  sense  confined 
To  know  but  this,  that  Thou  art  good, 

And  that  myself  am  blind." 

"  Not  a  word  of  that,"  he  wrote  in  1868,  "  requires 
change  for  me  at  this  time,  if  words  are  to  be  used 
at  all." 

Carlyle's  creed  might  have  given  some  support 
to  Jane  Welsh  and  filled  up  the  blank  in  her  mind 
had  she  been  able  to  grasp  it  and  believe  that  the 
Maker  of  all  things  will  do  right ;  but,  as  clever, 
self-sufficient  women  are  apt  to  do  when  they  have 
thrown  away  faith,  she  went  to  the  extreme  of 
scepticism.  Perhaps  if  she  had  read  "  The 
Nemesis  of  Faith "  she  might  have  been  cured  of 
her  doubts.  That  she  was  what  she  was,  was  no 
fault  of  Carlyle's.     Had  she  remained  in  the  fold  in 


THE  NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         33 

which  she  was  brought  up,  he  would  never  have 
called  her  out  of  it,  for  he  recognised  that  spiritual 
truth  may  have  many  different  vestments.  After 
his  own  re-birth  we  find  him  writing  to  his  aged 
mother  thus  :  "  Often,  my  dear  mother,  in  solitary 
pensive  moments,  does  it  come  across  me  like  the 
cold  shadow  of  death  that  we  two  must  part  in  the 
course  of  time.  I  shudder  at  the  thought,  and  find 
no  refuge  except  in  humbly  trusting  that  the  great 
God  will  surely  appoint  us  a  meeting  in  that  far 
country  to  which  we  are  tending.  May  He  bless 
you  for  ever,  my  dear  mother,  and  keep  up  in  your 
heart  the  sublime  hopes  which  at  present  serve  as 
a  pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and  a  pillar  of  fire  by  night, 
to  guide  our  footsteps  through  the  wilderness  of 
life.  We  are  in  His  hands.  He  will  not  utterly 
forsake  us.     Let  us  trust  in  Him." 

Two  years  before  her  death,  when  his  wife  was 
visiting  Dr.  Russell  at  Thornhill  amidst  the  scenes 
of  her  girlhood,  Carlyle  wrote  to  her :  "  What 
strange  old  days  (sunk  like  old  ages)  you  look  out 
upon  from  your  windows  there,  my  poor  heavy- 
laden  little  woman.  Yes  ;  but  it  is  for  ever  true 
'  The  Eternal  rules  above  us  '  and  in  us  and  around 
us  ;  and  this  is  not  Hell  or  Hades  but  the  '  Place 
of  Hope ' — the  Place  where  what  is  right  will  be 
fulfilled.  And  you  know  that,  too,  in  your  way,  my 
own  little  Jeannie — and  you  will  not  and  must  not 
forget  it ;  forgetting  it  one  would  go  mad." 

But  all  this  was  hypocrisy,  Froude  suggests. 
"  I  suppose,"  he  remarks  of  Carlyle,  "  that  his  own 
inconsistencies    interfered   with    the    effect    of    his 

D 


34         THE    NEMESIS    OF   FROUDE 

teaching.  He  '  recked  not  his  own  rede,'  and  those 
whose  practice  falls  short  of  their  theories  do  not 
seem  to  believe  really  in  their  theories  themselves." 
So  Mrs.  Carlyle  knew  her  husband  for  an  impostor, 
and  laughed  in  her  sleeve  at  his  invocations  of  the 
Silences,  the  Eternities,  etc.  And  yet  of  this  very 
man,  whom  Froude  thus  estimates,  in  1887,  he  had 
written  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  in  1880:  "I 
have  been  reading  over  the  letters  to  his  mother 
and  brothers.  They  are  so  admirable,  and  give  so 
full  a  picture  of  his  inner  life — so  consistent  from 
first  to  last,  that  I  think,  when  the  '  Reminiscences ' 
are  published,  these  letters  ought  to  form  an 
accompanying  volume.  No  life  could  be  written 
which  would  furnish  so  complete  a  conception  of 
him — of  his  own  nature  and  of  the  circumstances 
under  which  he  had  to  work." 

We  have  thus  far  followed  Froude  in  his 
pamphlet,  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  and  have 
found  it  really  an  exposition  of  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Carlyle's  relations  with  each  other.  If  we  ask  what 
the  impression  left  by  this  exposition  is,  the  answer 
must  surely  be  that  Carlyle,  if  Froude  is  to  be 
believed,  was  a  bully  and  a  brute,  selfish  and 
vaporish,  incessantly  wrangling  with  his  unhappy 
wife  whom  he  neglected,  ill-treated,  compelled  to 
engage  in  menial  offices  and  alienated  from  religion, 
thus  undermining  her  health  and  hastening  her 
death.  Fine  phrases  are  all  very  well,  but  they 
cannot  obscure  the  "  facts  of  things,"  if  they  are 
facts,  and  when  Froude  tells  us  that  he  did  not 
allow  his    reverence   and    admiration    for    Carlyle's 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         35 

intellect  and  high  moral  greatness  to  be  interfered 
with    by   what    he   saw    and    heard,    we    can   only 
marvel    at    his    moral    obtuseness   and    his    heed- 
lessness   in   writing   down    his   own  condemnation. 
Nay,    it   must    be    said    that    if    his    tale    is    true, 
there  was  more  than  moral  obtuseness  in  Froude's 
conduct  ;    there    was    cowardly    acquiescence    in   a 
flagrant  wrong.      For  six  years,  by  his  own  account, 
he  stood  by,  consenting  to  the  slow  martyrdom  of 
a  woman  whom    he   has    described  as  bright   and 
sparkling  and  tender  and  uttered  no  word  of  remon- 
strance  or   protest.      He   saw    her   involved   in    a 
perpetual  blizzard  and  did  nothing  to  shelter  her. 
He  witnessed  at  Cheyne  Row  the  enactment  of  "  a 
tragedy  as  stern  and  real  as  the  story  of  CEdipus," 
but  it  was  no  business  of  his.     It  was  enough  for 
him  to  be  admitted  to  the  Cheyne  Row  tea  parties 
and    enjoy    the    brilliancy    of     the     conversation. 
Froude's  representatives  must  ultimately  feel  grate- 
ful to  us  for  showing  that  he  was  not  altogether  as 
callous    as    he  has   endeavoured    to    prove   himself 
to  have  been. 

For  what  we  have  heard  hitherto  about  Carlyle 
from  Froude,  Froude  is  himself  responsible.  For 
the  general  description  of  the  life  at  Cheyne  Row 
and  of  Carlyle's  treatment  of  his  wife,  he  has,  in 
"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  drawn  entirely  on 
his  own  reminiscences.  We  are  expected  to 
receive  with  faith  his  recollections  of  what  he 
noticed  and  of  the  gossip  he  heard  when  admitted 
to  Carlyle's  family  circle,  which,  with  an  unparalleled 
abuse  of  hospitality,  he   has  made  use  of  to  sully 

d  2 


36         THE    NEMESIS    OF   FROUDE 

the  good  name  of  his  host.  No  particular  instance 
is  recalled  ;  no  confirmatory  evidence  is  quoted ; 
no  documentary  corroboration  is  referred  to.  The 
charges  rest  on  the  unsupported  testimony  of  an 
habitual  blunderer. 

But  besides  the  general  charges  against  Carlyle 
in  connection  with  his  treatment  of  his  wife,  which 
Froude  has  made,  he  has  three  specific  charges  to 
bring  forward,  and  for  these,  while  he  has  adopted 
and  published  them,  he  does  not  make  himself 
directly  answerable.  They  are  grave  charges.  One 
impugns  Carlyle's  conduct  in  connection  with  his 
friendship  with  Lady  Ashburton.  Another  traces 
the  unhappiness  of  his  married  life  to  a  physical 
defect  under  which,  it  is  alleged,  he  laboured,  and 
which  made  his  marriage  no  marriage.  A  third 
accuses  him  of  using  personal  violence  to  his  wife. 
Each  of  these  three  charges  rests  exclusively  upon 
the  evidence  of  one  witness,  and  in  each  case  that 
witness  is  the  same  person,  Miss  Geraldine  Jewsbury. 
The  whole  edifice  of  imputation  which  Froude  has 
with  so  much  ingenuity  and  apparent  ingenuousness 
erected,  rests  solely  on  confidential  communications 
made  to  him  by  this  lady,  and  the  first  and  most 
essential  point  to  determine  is  her  credibility. 

Froude  did  not,  of  course,  fail  to  realise  this. 
He  perceived  that  it  was  of  paramount  importance 
to  his  case  that  Miss  Jewsbury  should  be  believed, 
and  he  has  therefore  taken  pains  to  show  that  she 
had  the  best  opportunities  of  knowing  what  she 
spoke  about,  and  was  a  faithful,  guileless  creature  ; 
and  in  doing  this  he  has  resorted  to  methods  which 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         37 

are  certainly  not  characterised  by  an  excess  of  scru- 
pulosity. Mrs.  Carlyle,  he  tells  us,  spoke  and  wrote 
of  Geraldine  Jewsbury  as  her  Consuelo  ;  but  if  she 
did  so,  she  must  have  used  the  appellation  in  an 
ironical  sense,  for  their  correspondence  proves  that 
she  never  took  any  bit  of  advice  Miss  Jewsbury 
offered,  snubbed  her  peremptorily  whenever  she 
ventured  to  express  an  opinion,  and  looked  upon 
her  more  as  an  exasperator  than  as  a  com- 
forter. That  they  were  often  on  terms  of  close 
intimacy  is  true.  Miss  Jewsbury  was  a  gifted 
woman  who  had  introduced  herself  to  Carlyle  by 
writing  to  him  as  one  of  his  ardent  worshippers  and 
became  a  hanger-on  of  the  Cheyne  Row  household. 
But  her  intimacy  with  Mrs.  Carlyle  was  not  of  the 
sort  which  Froude  would  have  us  believe  and  which 
he  indicates  by  the  incorrect  statement  that  Miss 
Jewsbury  "was  about  Mrs.  Carlyle's  own  age": 
the  truth  being  that  there  were  eleven  years  between 
them — Mrs.  Carlyle  having  been  born  in  1801,  and 
Miss  Jewsbury  in  18 12.  Miss  Jewsbury  was  never 
admitted  to  the  penetralia  of  Mrs.  Carlyle's  thoughts 
and  feelings,  but  was  kept  waiting  and  serving  in 
the  courts  without,  and  there  was  always  an  element 
of  patronage  and  protection  in  Mrs.  Carlyle's  attitude 
towards  her.  Mrs.  Carlyle  was  flattered  by  the 
worship  she  offered,  and  was  grateful  for  the  many 
delicate  attentions  she  bestowed  ;  but  from  first  to 
last  she  treated  her  as  a  weak  and  wayward  being, 
destitute  of  discretion  and  good  sense,  and  it  is 
surely  a  significant  fact  that  Froude  deliberately 
suppressed   every  letter  of   Mrs.    Carlyle's  in  which 


IS*. 


38         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

her  candid  opinion  of  her  friend  is  set  forth. 
In  the  "  Letters  and  Memorials "  that  Froude 
selected  and  edited,  there  is  nothing  reflecting 
unfavourably  on  Miss  Jewsbury,  whereas  in  the 
"  New  Letters  and  Memorials "  may  be  found 
abundant  proofs  of  the  light  esteem  in  which 
Mrs.  Carlyle  held  her.  She  described  her  as  a 
fussy,  romantic,  hysterical  woman,  a  considerable 
fool,  with  her  head  packed  full  of  nonsense,  and 
nick-named  her  "  Miss  Gooseberry."  "  It  is  her 
besetting  sin,"  she  said,  "  and  her  trade  of  novelist 
has  aggravated  it — the  desire  of  feeling  and  pro- 
ducing violent  emotions."  Miss  Jewsbury's  intrigues 
and  love  affairs  are  often  contemptuously  alluded 
to  by  Mrs.  Carlyle.  "  Geraldine,"  she  wrote, 
"  has  one  besetting  weakness.  She  is  never  happy 
unless  she  has  a  grande  passion  on  hand,  and  as 
unmarried  men  take  fright  at  her  impulsive  and 
demonstrative  ways,  her  grandes  pissions  for  these 
thirty  years  have  been  all  expended  on  married 
men."  In  another  place  she  mentions  that  she  was 
"  openly  making  the  craziest  love  to  a  man  "  who 
was  engaged  to  be  married,  and  in  another  that  she 
was  "  in  a  frenzy  over  a  letter  from  her  declared 
lover,  an  Egyptian,"  who  had  one  wife  already,  and 
in  still  another  that  she  had  herself  allowed  that 
she  had  "absolutely  no  sense  of  decency."  And 
beyond  all  this  Miss  Jewsbury's  feelings  towards 
Mrs.  Carlyle  herself,  which  were  well-known  to 
Froude,  were  of  a  nature  that  should  have  made 
him  pause  before  listening  to  her  revelations 
on    ticklish    topics.       They  were    highly    extra va- 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         39 

gant,  and  in  some  degree  perverted.  The  mani- 
festation by  Mrs.  Carlyle  of  some  preference 
or  supposed  preference  for  another  woman  led 
on  one  occasion  to  a  wild  outburst  of  what 
Miss  Jewsbury  herself  called  "  tiger  jealousy," 
which,  says  Mrs.  Carlyle,  "  on  the  part  of  one 
woman  towards  another  it  had  never  entered  my 
head  to  conceive.  I  am  not  at  all  sure  she  is  not 
going  mad."  Other  instances  of  violent  emotional 
perturbations  over  Mrs.  Carlyle  are  recorded,  and 
the  language  of  Miss  Jewsbury's  letters  to  Mrs. 
Carlyle,  preserved  by  Mrs.  Ireland,  is  often  highly 
charged  and  erotic.  It  is  not  customary  for  a 
woman  of  thirty-two  years  of  age  to  write  to  her 
female  friend,  eleven  years  her  senior,  in  such  terms 
as  these  :  "  You  are  never  out  of  my  thoughts  one 
hour  together ;  "  "I  think  of  you  much  more  than 
if  you  were  my  lover ; "  "I  cannot  express  my 
feelings  even  to  you — vague  undefined  yearnings  to 
be  yours  in  some  way."  Of  delicate,  nervous, 
highly-strung  constitution,  Miss  Jewsbury  became  a 
morbid,  unstable,  excitable  woman,  constantly  com- 
plaining of  headaches  and  other  ailments,  and 
suffering  from  mental  depression,  for  she  chronicles 
of  herself:  "For  two  years  I  lived  only  in  short 
respites  from  this  blackness  of  despair.  It  is  not 
sorrow ;  one  could  endure  that.  Oh,  it  is  too 
frightful  to  talk  about !  The  depression  which  falls 
upon  one  in  a  moment,  enveloping  one  body  and 
soul  for  hours  or  days,  as  it  may  be,  and  the  horrid, 
lucid  interval  which  we  spend  in  dread  of  its  return, 
knowing   full    well    that   it   will    come."      All    the 


4o         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

biographical  details  of  Miss  Jewsbury  which  we 
possess,  and  they  are  ample,  establish  that,  notwith- 
standing her  interesting  personality,  her  brilliant 
conversational  powers  and  fine  literary  talent,  she 
was  unreliable  and  erratic,  or,  as  Carlyle  summed 
her  up,  "  a  flimsy  tatter  of  a  creature." 

In  order  to  show  that  Carlyle  placed  some 
confidence  in  Miss  Jewsbury,  we  are  told  by  Froude 
that  he  "  had  requested  Miss  Geraldine  Jewsbury, 
who  had  been  his  wife's  most  intimate  friend,  to  tell 
him  any  biographical  anecdotes  which  she  could 
remember  to  have  heard  from  Mrs.  Carlyle's  lips," 
and  that  after  reading  these  he  wrote,  "  Few  or 
none  of  these  narratives  are  correct  in  details, 
but  there  is  a  certain  mythical  truth  in  all  or 
most  of  them."  This  in  the  original  is  as  follows, 
being  a  letter  to  Miss  Jewsbury:  "Dear  Geral- 
dine,— Few  or  none  of  these  Narratives  are  correct 
in  all  the  details ;  some  of  them,  in  almost  all 
the  details  are  incorrect.  I  have  not  read  care- 
fully beyond  a  certain  point  which  is  marked  on 
the  margin.  Your  recognition  of  the  character 
is  generally  true  and  faithful ;  little  of  portraiture 
in  it  that  satisfies  me.  On  the  whole,  all  tends 
to  the  mythical;  it  is  very  strange  how  much 
of  mythical  there  already  here  is !  As  Lady 
Lothian  set  you  on  writing,  it  seems  hard  that  she 
should  not  see  what  you  have  written  :  but  I  wish 
you  to  take  her  word  of  honour  that  no  one  else 
shall ;  and  my  earnest  request  to  you  is  that, 
directly  from  her  Ladyship,  you  will  bring  the  Book 
to  me   and  consign   it   to  my   keeping.     No  need 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         41 

that  an  idle-gazing  world  should  know  my  lost 
Darling's  History,  or  mine  ; — nor  will  they  ever  ; — 
they  may  depend  upon  it !  One  fit  service,  and  one 
only,  they  can  do  to  Her  or  to  Me  :  cease  speaking 
of  us  through  all  eternity,  as  soon  as  they  conve- 
niently can."  The  words,  "There  is  a  certain 
mythical  truth,"  etc.,  are  transferred  and  altered 
by  Mr.  Froude  from  a  subsequent  passage,  and 
Miss  Jewsbury's  Narratives,  which  nobody  but  Lady 
Lothian  was  to  see,  were  of  course  published  in 
full  by  Froude. 

Of  Miss  Jewsbury's  Narratives  of  his  wife, 
Carlyle  said  that  her  accounts  of  her  childhood 
were  substantially  correct,  but  as  regards  the  rest 
"  few  or  none  are  correct  in  all  the  details,  some  of 
them  in  almost  all  the  details  are  incorrect."  He 
subsequently  refers  to  the  Narratives  as  a  "  Book  of 
Myths,"  and  declares  that  they  grow  more  and  more 
mythical  as  they  go  on.  "  Geraldine's  account  of 
Comley  Bank  and  life  at  Edinbugh  is  extremely 
mythic."  "Geraldine's  Craigenputtock  stories  are 
more  mythical  than  any  of  the  rest ; "  and  it  is  upon 
these  Craigenputtock  stories,  mythical  of  the  mythic, 
that  Froude  based  his  primary  indictment  against 
Carlyle  for  his  treatment,  or  rather  maltreatment,  of 
his  wife. 

And  this  Geraldine,  this  weaver  of  myths,  this 
hysterical  and  irresponsible  woman,  is  the  sole 
witness  he  has  to  call  in  support  of  his  serious 
charges  against  Carlyle,  two  of  which  are  now  for 
the  first  time  brought  to  light. 

It  was  in  what  may  be  called  the  "  Ashburton 


42         THE    NEMESIS  OF   FROUDE 

Affair  "  that  Froude  first  invoked  Miss  Jewsbury  s 
aid — an  affair  in  connexion  with  which  the  injustice 
he  has  done  Carlyle  may  be  made  clearly  apparent. 
His  first  knowledge  of  it — for  he  was  never 
himself  admitted  to  the  Ashburton  circle — came  to 
him,  he  states,  in  1871,  more  probably  in  1873, 
when  a' large  parcel  of  papers,  including  the  Memoir 
of  Mrs.  Carlyle  and  her  Letters,  handed  to  him  by 
Carlyle,  led  him  to  place  himself  in  communication 
with  John  Forster,  who  told  him  a  singular  story. 
He  told  him,  he  says,  "  that  Lady  Ashburton  had 
fallen  deeply  in  love  with  Carlyle,  that  Carlyle  had 
behaved  nobly,  and  that  Lord  Ashburton  had 
thanked  him."  Those  who  knew  John  Forster — a 
generous,  straightforward  man,  trained  and  even 
sworn,  as  a  Commissioner  in  Lunacy,  to  silence  as 
to  family  secrets — will  be  chary  in  believing  that, 
even  had  he  been  certain  of  all  this,  he  would  have 
communicated  it  to  Froude,  whose  reputation  for 
literary  indiscretion  was  already  established,  and 
thus  have  compromised  the  reputation  of  a  woman 
of  high  rank  and  brilliant  ability,  of  whose  hospitality 
he  had  often  partaken.  But  as  it  turns  out  that  he 
had  and  could  have  had  no  foundation  for  the 
defamatory  statement,  it  may  be  taken  as  certain 
that  he  never  made  it.  Familiar  as  he  was  with  the 
usages  of  society,  knowing  as  he  did  the  terms  of 
close  intimacy  on  which  the-Ashburtons  and  Carlyles 
remained  after  her  ladyship's  alleged  indiscretion 
and  Carlyle's  noble  conduct,  it  is  impossible  that  he 
could  have  harboured  such  a  suspicion.  His  alleged 
communication  to  Froude  on  the  subject,  of  which 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         43 

no  shred  of  corroboration  can  be  adduced,  may  be 
set  down  therefore  as  one  of  Froude's  imaginary 
conversations. 

But  even  if  John  Forster  had  told  Froude  what 
he  repeats,  the  introduction  of  the  little  bit  of 
scandal  into  Froude's  narrative  is  gratuitous  and 
inexcusable.  It  was,  he  assures  us,  wholly  untrue. 
Then  why  cause  annoyance  to  Lady  Ashburton's 
family  and  friends  by  referring  to  it  at  all  ?  Merely 
to  secure  an  antithetical  effect.  The  story  was  not 
only  untrue,  but  the  opposite  of  the  truth.  It  was 
not,  Froude  now  informs  us,  Lady  Ashburton  who 
was  deeply  in  love  with  Carlyle,  but  Carlyle  who 
was  deeply  in  love  with  Lady  Ashburton.  And 
here  let  us  mark  in  passing  an  illustration  of  the 
unblushing  inconsistency  of  our  informant.  "  That 
Carlyle  should  have  behaved  nobly,"  he  writes, 
"under  such  circumstances  [that  is  in  rejecting 
Lady  Ashburton's  advances]  seemed  extremely 
likely  to  me,"  and  in  the  next  paragraph  but  one 
he  represents  Carlyle  as  behaving  with  detestable 
meanness  in  making  love  to  his  friend's  wife  at  the 
very  time  when  he  was  accepting  favours  at  that 
friend's  hand.  This  is  indeed  characteristic  of 
Froude's  handling  of  Carlyle.  He  presents  him  to 
us  as  a  bundle  of  contrarieties  and  incompatabilities 
and  mutually  destructive  elements  such  as  never 
lodged  together  in  one  human  body. 

It  was  not  until  1871,  according  to  Froude  (or 
1873,  as  we  shall  hereafter  show),  when  he  read 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  Journal,  that  the  true  inwardness 
of  the  Ashburton   affair  dawned  on  him.      There, 


44        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

he  says,  was  the  explanation  of  much  of  the  bitter- 
ness that  appeared  in  her  letters  ;  but  writing  in 
Cuba  in  1887  he  seems  to  have  forgotten  what  he 
wrote  in  London  in  1883,  for  then  he  unequivocally 
stated,  in  his  note  to  the  Journal,  that  he  did  not 
understand  it  and  submitted  it  to  Miss  Geraldine 
Jewsbury,  who  supplied  him  with  the  version  of 
the  Ashburton  affair,  which  he  now  adopts  and  sets 
forth  as  his  own. 

Froude  had  no  personal  knowledge  of  the  Ash- 
burton affair.  Mrs.  Carlyle's  Journal  remained  dark 
to  him.  He  invited  Miss  Jewsbury  to  let  in  the 
light  on  it,  and  she  burned  magnesium  and  strontium 
with  dazzling  and  blinding  effect.  He  unhesitatingly 
accepted  this  variety  artist's  interpretation  of  what 
was  cryptic  in  the  Journal,  and  in  "  My  Relations 
with  Carlyle "  he  presents  it  as  his  own  without 
even  mentioning  Miss  Jewsbury's  name,  and  con- 
veys the  idea  that  it  was  in  the  papers  placed  in 
his  hands  that  he  himself  found  the  solution  of  the 
Ashburton  mystery.  There  he  discovered,  he  would 
have  us  believe,  that  "  Carlyle  had  sate  at  the  feet 
of  the  fine  lady,  adoring  and  worshipping,  had 
made  himself  the  plaything  of  her  caprices,  had 
made  Lady  Ashburton  the  object  of  the  same 
idolatrous  homage  which  he  had  once  paid  to 
herself"  [his  wife]. 

That  is  a  grave  charge  to  bring  against  "  a 
great  spiritual  teacher,"  and  on  the  face  of  it 
somewhat  improbable  as  brought  against  a  man 
between  fifty  and  sixty  years  of  age,  and  of  such  a 
constitution    that   according    to    Froude    he   ought 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE        45 

never  to  have  married.  But  let  Froude  call  his 
witnesses.  He  has  but  one.  Miss  Geraldine  Jews- 
bury  steps  into  the  box.  "  This  flimsy  tatter  of  a 
creature,"  as  Carlyle  called  her,  this  hysterical 
woman,  this  practised  romancer,  this  volume  of 
"  exaggerations  and  affectations  and  got-up  feelings," 
is  the  sole  prop  of  Froude's  case.  And  how  did  he 
take  her  evidence  ?  Not  by  asking  her  what  she 
knew  of  the  affair,  but  by  sending  her  Mrs.  Carlyle's 
private  Journal,  which  she  had  kept  locked  up  and 
never  meant  human  eye  to  see,  and  asking  her  to 
read  for  him  between  the  lines  of  the  obscure 
passages.  The  task  was  no  doubt  a  congenial  one 
to  Miss  Jewsbury.  She  gave  wings  to  her  fancy. 
She  had  never  been  admitted  to  the  real  confidence 
of  that  sensible  and  discreet  woman  Mrs.  Carlyle, 
but  she  had  no  hesitation  in  imagining  that  she 
had  been  behind  the  scenes  and  had  seen  the  actors 
in  undress.  She  accused  Carlyle  of  having  lingered 
"  in  the  primrose  path  of  dalliance  "  and  of  being 
"  a  philosopher  in  chains  "  to  a  great  and  capricious 
lady,  and  so  subjecting  his  poor  wife  to  "  sufferings 
real,  intense,  and  at  times  too  grievous  to  be  borne  " 
Froude  instantly  and  implicitly  accepted  Miss 
Jewsbury's  key  to  the  Ashburton  cypher.  Forster's 
alleged  story  had  to  be  put  aside,  and  here,  again, 
crops  up  Froude's  inaccuracy.  "  What,"  he  asks, 
"was  the  meaning  of  Forster's  story?  He  died 
soon  after,  and  I  had  no  opportunity  of  asking  him." 
But  Miss  Jewsbury  supplied  her  key  to  the  Ash- 
burton cypher  either  in  1871  or  1873,  and  Forster 
died  in  1876,  and  was  vigorous  to  the  last,  and  yet 


46        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

in  three  or  four  years  Froude  could  not  find  an 
opportunity  of  asking  him  to  explain  an  entirely 
erroneous  story,  for  which  he  had  made  himself 
responsible,  and  to  clear  up  a  point  vitally  affecting 
the  character  of  the  great  man  whose  life  he  (Froude) 
had  undertaken  to  write,  and  to  write,  as  he  is 
always  assuring  us,  with  such  scrupulous  fidelity. 
Was  the  penny  post  suspended  ?  Could  he  not 
walk  a  mile,  or  spare  a  quarter  of  an  hour  ?  The 
truth  is  Miss  Jewsbury's  theory  suited  him  exactly, 
being  in  harmony  with  his  preconceived  opinion, 
and  he  did  not  think  it  necessary  to  submit  it  to  any 
close  scrutiny.  Carlyle  lived  for  seven  years  after 
Froude  was  put  in  possession  of  it,  and  surely,  in 
common  justice,  he  ought  to  have  been  asked  to 
confirm  or  contradict  it.  "  I  tried  once,"  says 
Froude,  "  to  approach  the  subject  with  Carlyle  him- 
self, but  he  shrank  from  it  with  such  signs  of  distress 
that  I  could  not  speak  to  him  about  it  again." 
Strange  conduct  this  on  the  part  of  a  man  who 
during  four  years  never  walked  out  with  Froude — 
and  they  walked  out  together  twice  weekly — with- 
out drifting  back,  so  Froude  tells  us,  into  a  pathetic 
cry  of  sorrow  over  things  that  were  irreparable,  and 
giving  expression  to  a  repentance  that  was  deep 
and  passionate.  One  would  have  thought  that  it 
would  have  been  a  relief  to  him  to  have  made  a 
clean  breast  of  it  to  his  father  confessor.  A  repent- 
ance that  consists  of  pharisaical  generalities,  and 
does  not  condescend  to  particulars,  is  not  of  the 
noble  type  which  Froude  affirms  Carlyle's  to  have 
been  ;  and  it  seems  probable,  therefore,  that  Froude's 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         47 

approach  to  Carlyle  on  the  Ashburton  affair  must 
be  put  down  amongst  the  imaginary  conversations, 
more  especially  as  with  others,  Carlyle  never  in  his 
declining  years  manifested  the  slightest|disinclina- 
tion  to  talk  about  his  friendship  with  the  Ashburtons. 
Never  did  Carlyle,  in  conversation  or  in  his  writings, 
even  in  the  gloomiest  hours  of  his  bereavement, 
express  the  least  sorrow  or  contrition,  or  blame  him- 
self in  connection  with  his  intimacy  with  Lady 
Ashburton.  He  always  refers  to  it  with  pride  ;  and 
there  is,  as  Venables  had  justly  remarked,  "  a  total 
unconsciousness  of  any  questionable  conduct  or 
feeling"  on  his  own  part.  "  Least  of  all,  does  he 
regret  the  long-continued  friendship  which  at  one 
time  caused  her  [Mrs.  Carlyle]  so  much  discontent." 
No  one  can  read  Carlyle's  moving  note  on  the 
death  of  Lady  Ashburton,  without  perceiving  that 
he  looked  back  on  his  friendship  with  her  with  no 
qualms  of  conscience  : — "  Monday,  4th  May,  4^  p.m., 
at  Paris,  died  Lady  Ashburton  :  a  great  and  irre- 
parable sorrow  to  me ;  yet  with  some  beautiful 
consolations  in  it,  too."  In  annotating  his  wife's 
letters  after  her  death,  when  in  the  full  flood  of  his 
grief,  and  when  remorse  for  any  wrong  done  to  her, 
if,  as  Froude  affirms,  it  visited  him,  must  have  been 
tormenting  his  soul,  he  could  thus  write  of  the 
woman  whom  Froude  points  to  as  her  rival  in  his 
affections:  "The  most  queen-like  woman  I  had  ever 
known  or  seen.  The  honour  of  her  constant  regard 
had,  for  ten  years  back,  been  amongst  my  proudest 
and  most  valued  possessions  — lost  now  ;  gone — for 
ever  gone !  ...   In   no  society,    English  or  other, 


48         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

had  I  seen  the  equal  or  the  second  of  this  great 
lady  that  has  gone  ;  by  nature  and  by  culture  facile 
princeps,  she,  I  think,  of  all  great  ladies  I  have  ever 
seen."  In  Mrs.  Carlyle,  a  great  change  took  place 
in  her  view  of  Lady  Ashburton  after  that  lady's 
death.  She  was  then,  in  1857,  recovering  in 
some  measure  from  the  morbid  melancholy  which 
was  at  its  acme  in  1856,  and  the  scales  fell  from  her 
eyes.  Regarding  Lady  Ashburton's  funeral,  which 
Carlyle  attended,  she  wrote,  "  All  the  men  who  used 
to  compose  a  sort  of  Court  for  her  were  there  in 
tears."  As  to  her  first  visit  to  the  Grange  after 
Lady  Ashburton's  death,  she  wrote  :  "  The  same 
household  of  visitors  ;  the  same  elaborate  apparatus 
for  living  ;  and  the  life  of  the  whole  thing  gone 
out  of  it !  Acting  a  sort  of  Play  of  the  Past,  with 
the  principal  Part  suppressed,  obliterated  by  the 
stern  hand  of  Death."  She  actually  accepted  from 
Lord  Ashburton  some  of  the  belongings  of  his  late 
wife,  which  she  could  scarcely  have  done  had  her 
feelings  towards  her  continued  as  they  were  in 
1856.  "  I  wish  you  would  thank  Lord  Ashburton 
for  me,"  she  wrote  to  her  husband  from  Haddington  ; 
"  I  couldn't  say  anything  about  his  kindness  in 
giving  me  those  things  which  she  had  been  in  the 
habit  of  wearing  ;  I  felt  so  sick  and  so  like  to  cry, 
that  I  am  afraid  I  seemed  quite  stupid  and 
ungrateful  to  him." 

But  if  Froude  hesitated  to  sound  Carlyle  on  the 
Ashburton  affair  and  could  not  in  three  years  find 
time  to  interrogate  Forster,  there  were,  at  the  time 
Miss  Jewsbury's  version  of  it  was  communicated  to 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         49 

him,  various  other  ways  of  getting  at  the  truth. 
Miss  Mary  Aitken,  whom  he  at  that  time  addressed 
in  his  letters  as  "  My  dear  Mary,"  was  living  with 
her  uncle,  and  had  access  to  all  his  papers  and  could 
have  helped  him.  Dr.  John  Carlyle,  who  knew 
more  than  any  one  else  of  what  the  married  life  of 
his  brother  and  sister-in-law  had  been,  was  alive 
and  could  have  settled  the  point.  The  second  Lady 
Ashburton  was  alive,  and  could  have  resolved  his 
difficulties.  To  not  one  of  these  did  he  apply.  Not 
one  of  them  is  he  able  to  quote.  To  none  of 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  friends  at  the  time  of  the  Ashburton 
affair,  save  Miss  Jewsbury,  did  he  apply  for  en- 
lightenment. He  buttoned  up  in  his  breast  that 
lady's  precious  disclosure  and  reserved  it  for  post- 
mortem application.  True,  he  says,  "  there  are  in 
existence,  or  there  were,  masses  of  extravagant 
letters  of  Carlyle's  to  the  great  lady  as  ecstatic  as 
Don  Quixote's  to  Dulcinea,"  but  he  does  not 
say  that  he  has  ever  seen  these  letters,  or  has 
derived  his  knowledge  of  their  nature,  from  any  one 
who  has  seen  them.  It  ought  to  be  a  sufficient 
answer  to  Froude's  statement  to  recall  the  fact  that 
these  letters  passed,  on  Lady  Ashburton's  death, 
into  the  hands  of  her  husband  who  read  them,  and 
cannot  have  thought  them  offensive  in  any  way,  as  he 
continued  one  of  Carlyle's  warmest  friends  until  his 
life's  end,  that  on  his  death  they  were  read  by  his 
widow  Louisa,  Lady  Ashburton,  who  also  main- 
tained an  uninterrupted  friendship  with  the  writer. 
A  little  while  before  Carlyle's  death,  Louisa,  Lady 
Ashburton,  told   Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  that  she 

E 


5o        THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE 

had  burnt,  or  was  going  to  burn,  the  letters,  that 
they  were  friendly  intimate  letters,  expressive  of 
admiration,  but  in  no  way  transgressing  proper 
bounds.  If  in  one  of  these  letters,  as  Froude 
declares,  Carlyle  asked  Lady  Ashburton  not  to  tell 
his  wife  of  some  visit  he  paid  her,  the  circumstance 
is  susceptible  not  merely  of  an  innocent  but  of  a 
laudable  explanation,  for  during  part  of  the  Ash- 
burton friendship,  his  wife  was  in  her  morbid 
jealousy,  feverishly  counting  his  visits  to  Bath 
House,  and  it  might  have  been  humane  to  conceal 
from  her  that  he  had  dined  there. 

But  if  Carlyle's  letters  to  Lady  Ashburton  have 
been  destroyed,  Lady  Ashburton's  replies  to  them 
have  been  preserved.  Carlyle  said  they  were  "  dry 
as  sticks,"  but  they  read  now  as  simple,  friendly, 
kindly  epistles.  In  not  one  of  them  is  there  any 
chidinof  of  the  Ouixotic  exuberance  of  the  corre- 
spondent,  which  Froude  has  affirmed  ;  in  not  one 
is  there  a  trace  of  the  imperious  mistress  to  whom 
Carlyle  was  a  passing  amusement  and  a  slave,  as 
Froude  has  phrased  it,  going  far  beyond  even  the 
transcendental  Miss  Jewsbury,  who  is  obliged  to 
admit  that  any  other  wife  than  Mrs.  Carlyle  "  would 
have  laughed  at  Mr.  Carlyle's  bewitchment  with  Lady 
Ashburton."  Froude  insinuated  that  Carlyle  was 
extravagantly  deluded,  and  having  drawn  the  con- 
trast that  Lady  Ashburton  was  a  great  lady  of  the 
world,  while  "  Carlyle  with  all  his  genius  had  the 
manners  to  the  last  of  an  Annandale  peasant,"  he 
recalls  an  instance  of  a  peasant  of  genius  who  was 
weak  enough  to  believe  that  a  great  lady  who  had 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         51 

taken  an  admiring  interest  in  him,  under  analagous 
circumstances,  wanted  to  marry  him.  All  this  is 
designed  to  bring  censure  and  derision  on  Carlyle, 
and  all  is  wide  of  the  mark.  Carlyle  was  proud  to 
call  himself  a  peasant's  son,  but  at  the  same  time 
he  had  some  good  Scottish  blood  in  his  veins. 
Froude  said,  and  he  must  have  forgotten  he 
had  said  it,  "  There  was  reason  to  believe  that 
his  own  father  was  the  actual  representative  of  the 
Lords  of  Torthorwald ;  and  though  he  laughed, 
when  he  spoke  of  it,  he  was  clearly  not  displeased 
to  know  that  he  had  noble  blood  in  him.  Rustic 
as  he  was  in  habits,  dress  and  complexion,  he  had  a 
knightly,  chivalrous  temperament,  and  fine  natural 
courtesy ;  another  sure  sign  of  good  breeding  was 
his  hand,  which  was  small,  perfectly  shaped  with 
long  fine  fingers  and  aristocratic  finger  nails." 
Venables,  too,  had  said,  "  Notwithstanding  his 
humble  birth  and  rustic  training,  he  was  keenly 
sensible  to  refinement  of  character  and  manner, 
and  his  own  demeanour,  tho'  not  conventional, 
was  gracious  and  on  fit  occasions  courtly."  "  My 
recollections  of  him  are  of  almost  uniform  geniality 
and  unfailing  courtesy,  tho'  his  cheerfulness  might 
not  be  always  undisturbed."  Carlyle's  manners  of 
an  Annandale  peasant  did  not  exclude  him  from 
the  highest  circles  of  London  Society,  and  were 
assuredly  no  barrier  to  the  friendship  of  that  great 
Lady,  Lady  Ashburton,  which  was  the  utmost  that, 
in  her  case,  he  ever  aspired  to. 

Stripped  of  the  bedizenments  that  Froude  and 
Miss  Jewsbury  have  decked  it  in,   the  Ashburton 

e  2 


52         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

affair  is  innocent  and  intelligible  enough.  It  was 
Mrs.  Carlyle  who  made  the  acquaintance  of  Lady 
Ashburton  in  the  first  instance,  when  she  formed  a 
high  opinion  of  her  merits,  describing  her  as  the 
cleverest  woman  she  had  ever  met,  full  of  energy 
and  sincerity,  and  with  an  excellent  heart ;  and  it 
was  she  who  urged  Carlyle  to  accept  the  invitations 
which  Lord  Ashburton,  then  Mr.  Baring,  gave  him 
to  his  town  and  country  houses,  realising  the  advan- 
tages which  might  accrue  from  the  acquaintance  of 
the  distinguished  people  that  he  met  in  these  places. 
Carlyle  was  reserved  and  fastidious,  and,  had  he 
declined  the  hand  which  the  Ashburtons  held  out, 
London  Society  of  the  better  sort  might  long  have 
remained  closed  to  him.  As  the  Ashburtons'  guest, 
he  met  on  equal  terms  men  of  rank  and  letters. 
Until  the  death  of  Sir  Robert  Peel,  he  probably 
entertained  some  hope  of  entering  public  or  official 
life,  and  it  was  therefore  desirable  that  he  should 
become  known  to  the  leading  politicians  of  the 
period.  He  took  pleasure,  too,  legitimate  pleasure, 
in  the  society  of  the  brilliant  and  ambitious  woman, 
so  full  of  intellectual  gaiety  and  satirical  caprice, 
who  presided  over  the  Ashburton  circle  ;  but  that  he 
was  not,  as  Froude  suggests,  an  interloper  in  that 
circle,  paying  clandestine  homage  to  its  mistress, 
let  Lord  Houghton,  writing  when  both  Lady 
Ashburton  and  Carlyle  were  dead,  attest :  "  There 
could,"  he  says,  "be  no  better  guarantee  of  these 
qualities  (a  joyous  sincerity  that  no  conventionalities, 
high  or  low,  could  restrain — a  festive  nature  flower- 
ing through  the  artificial  soil  of  elevated  life)  than 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         53 

the  constant  friendship  that  existed  between  Lady 
Ashburton  and  Carlyle— on  her  part  one  of  filial 
respect  and  duteous  admiration.  The  frequent 
presence  of  the  great  moralist  of  itself  gave  to  the 
life  of  Bath  House  and  The  Grange  a  reality  that 
made  the  most  ordinary  worldly  component  parts 
of  it  more  human  and  worthy  than  elsewhere." 

That  the  friendship  between  Carlyle  and  Lady 
Ashburton  never,  on  either  side,  drifted  into  ex- 
travagance, the  character  and  conduct  of  Lord 
Ashburton  are  a  sufficient  Guarantee.  He  had 
been  engaged  in  vast  monetary  transactions  in 
various  parts  of  the  world  ;  he  had,  as  Mr.  Bingham 
Baring,  formed  part  of  the  Administration  of 
Sir  Robert  Peel  in  1835.  He  was  a  man  of  the 
noblest  and  purest  purpose,  with  an  entirely  un- 
selfish and  truthful  disposition,  who,  while  mani- 
festing lover-like  delight  and  intellectual  wonder  in 
the  display  of  his  wife's  genius  and  gaiety,  main- 
tained, we  are  told,  a  quiet  authority  over  her  in  all 
the  serious  affairs  of  life.  Is  it  likely  that  such  a 
man  would  tolerate  the  slightest  indiscretion  on  the 
part  of  his  wife  or  of  Carlyle,  or  permit,  under  his 
roof,  anything  calculated  to  cause  just  pain  and 
anger  to  Mrs.  Carlyle,  for  whom  he  felt  the  highest 
regard  ? 

In  the  early  days  the  Ashburton  friendship  was 
a  source  of  unalloyed  pleasure  to  Mrs.  Carlyle. 
The  invitations  to  Bath  House  or  Addiscombe 
invariably  included  her — unless  in  the  case  of  a 
gentlemen's  dinner-party — and  she  many  times  went 
alone,  leaving  her  husband  at  home.     But,  as  time 


54        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

went  on,  a  certain  jealousy  of  Lady  Ashburton  took 
possession  of  her  mind.  Lady  Ashburton  was  as 
clever  a  conversationalist  as  she,  and  had  social 
prestige  which  gave  her  an  advantage,  and  Mrs. 
Carlyle  could  not  bear  to  be  outshone.  She  first 
grudged  Lady  Ashburton  the  attention  and  admira- 
tion she  commanded  in  the  general  circle,  she  then 
grudged  specifically  the  attention  and  admiration 
that  Carlyle  openly  gave  her,  and  finally  she  got  it 
into  her  head  that  Carlyle  had  transferred  to  her 
the  attention  and  admiration  he  once  surrendered 
to  his  wife,  and  was  in  love  with  her.  Then  it 
was  that  in  pathetic,  sometimes  in  bitter  accents, 
she  gave  utterance  to  the  morbid  jealousy  that 
consumed  her — 

"  Oh,  waly,  waly,  love  is  bonnie 
A  little  while  when  it  is  new; 

But  when  it's  auld 

It  waxeth  cauld, 
And  melts  away  like  morning  dew." 

"  Beautiful  verse,  sweet  and  sad,  like  barley- 
sugar  dissolved  in  tears.  About  the  morning  dew, 
however !  I  would  say,  '  Goes  out  like  candle 
snuff'  would  be  a  truer  simile  ;  only  that  would  not 
suit  the  rhyme." 

This  last  phase,  however,  morbid  jealousy, 
only  came  when  Mrs.  Carlyle's  health  had  given 
way,  and  was  indeed  but  a  sign  of  mental  disorder. 
It  may  be  laid  down  as  axiomatic  in  medical  psy- 
chology, that  when  a  highly  neurotic  and  childless 
woman,  at  a  critical  period  of  life,  takes  to  morphia, 
morbid  jealousy  will  develop  itself.     Mrs.   Carlyle 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         55 

was  highly  neurotic  and  childless,  and  at  a  critical 
period  of  life  she  became  addicted  to  morphia 
and  other  drugs,  and  ultimately  developed  morbid 
jealousy  of  her  husband.  No  medical  man  can  look 
carefully  into  her  case  without  being  convinced  that 
she  suffered  from  neurasthenia  and  climacteric 
melancholia,  and  that  the  piteous  outcries  of  the 
Journal,  which  Froude,  guided  by  Miss  Jewsbury, 
accepted  as  proofs  of  her  husband's  perfidy  and 
cruelty,  were  really  but  the  empty  ejaculations  of 
her  disordered  feelings.  Only  the  husband  who  has 
gone  through  the  ordeal  of  living  for  years  with 
a  wife  emotionally  deranged,  but  intellectually  clear 
as  Mrs.  Carlyle  was,  can  realise  what  Carlyle  must 
have  endured,  at  a  time,  too,  when  he  was  struggling" 
and  almost  sinking  under  a  heavy  task.  His 
sympathetic  gentleness  and  forbearance  are  beyond 
all  praise.  Froude  having  thrown  off  all  constraints 
now  declares  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  was  "  ashamed  and 
indignant  at  the  unworthy  position  in  which  her 
husband  was  placing  himself.  Rinaldo  in  the  bower 
of  Armida  or  Hercules  spinning  silks  for  Omphale." 
It  must  have  escaped  his  memory  that  he  had 
formerly  written  "  Carlyle's  letters  during  all  this 
period  [the  Asburton  affair  period]  are  uniformly 
tender  and  affectionate,  and  in  them  was  his  true 
self,  if  she  could  but  have  allowed  herself  to  see  it." 
The  Ashburton  affair  was  truly,  as  Froude 
remarks,  the  cause  of  much  heartburning  and 
misery  at  Cheyne  Row,  but  it  was  so  only  because 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  diseased  fancies  fastened  upon  it,  as 
they  would  have  fastened  on   something  else  had 


56         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

Carlyle  broken  with  the  Ashburtons  altogether. 
Froude  has  wholly  misunderstood  it,  has  published 
abroad  the  midnight  mutterings  of  a  sick  woman, 
and  has  based  on  them  discreditable  reflections  on 
her  long-suffering  husband.  That  Carlyle  took  the 
correct  view  of  his  wife's  condition  is  clear,  for 
looking  back  on  it  in  1866,  he  ascribed  the 
dispiritment  and  unhappiness  of  his  wife  "chiefly 
to  the  deeper  downbreak  of  her  own  poor  health, 
which  from  this  time  [1856,  the  date  of  the  Journal], 
as  I  now  see  better,  continued  its  advance  upon  the 
citadel  or  nervous  system." 

But  bad  as  in  Froude's  sight  the  Ashburton 
affair  was,  something  worse  remained  behind. 
Carlyle  "  had  said  in  his  Journal  that  there  was  a 
secret  connected  with  him  unknown  to  his  closest 
friends,"  and  without  a  knowledge  of  which  no  true 
biography  was  possible;  and  so,  when  selected  as 
his  biographer,  Froude  set  himself  to  find  out  this 
secret,  which  if  unearthed  must  necessarily  influ- 
ence him  in  all  he  might  say.  He  had  no  doubt 
from  the  first  that  it  was  connected  with  some 
moral  delinquency,  and  how  wildly  awry  he  went 
in  his  reading  of  Carlyle's  papers  may  be  best 
shown  by  quoting  the  passage  in  the  Journal,  and 
the  only  passage,  in  which  the  so-called  secret  is 
referred  to.  It  is  dated  29th  December,  1848, 
and  runs  as  follows  :  "  Darwin  said  to  Jane,  the 
other  day  in  his  quizzing-serious  manner,  '  Who 
will  write  Carlyle's  <  Life '  ?  The  word  reported 
to  me,  set  me  thinking  how  impossible  it  was  and 
would  for  ever  remain,   for  any  creature    to  write 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         57 

my  '  Life  ' ;  the  chief  elements  of  my  little  destiny 
have  all  along  lain  deep  below  view  or  surmise, 
and  never  will  or  can  be  known  to  any  son  of 
Adam.  I  would  say  to  my  biographer,  if  any  fool 
undertook  such  a  task,  '  Forbear,  poor  fool ;  let  no 
life  of  me  be  written  ;  let  me  and  my  bewildered 
wrestlings  lie  buried  here,  and  be  forgotten  swiftly 
of  all  the  world.  If  thou  write,  it  will  be  mere  delu- 
sions and  hallucinations.  The  confused  world  never 
understood,  nor  will  understand,  me  and  my  poor 
affairs  ;  not  even  the  persons  nearest  me  could 
guess  at  them  ; — nor  was  it  found  indispensable  ; 
nor  is  it  now,  for  any  but  an  idle  purpose,  profitable, 
were  it  even  possible.  Silence,  and  go  thy  ways 
elsewhither.'  "  To  the  common  man,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  student  of  Carlyle's  writings,  but  one  inter- 
pretation of  this  is  possible.  It  refers  not  to  one 
secret  but  to  many — to  the  bewildered  wrestlings 
of  the  writer's  soul  with  the  mysteries  of  being, 
to  those  incommunicable  stirrings  that  agitate  the 
depths  of  every  human  heart.  It  is  but  a  variant 
of  what  Carlyle  has  said  many  times  in  his  books 
about  the  sacramental  nature  of  life,  and  the 
barrier  that  must  always  shut  out  one  human 
being  from  another.  But  that  would  not  do  for 
Froude  ;  he  detected  a  personal  secret  in  this 
passage,  and  determined  to  ferret  it  out.  And  help 
came  to  him  in  that  daughter  of  Eve,  Miss  Jewsbury, 
who  at  once  detected  what  Carlyle  had  said  no  son 
of  Adam  could  find  out,  and  made  patent  what  he 
had  thought  not  even  the  persons  nearest  him — 
therefore  not  even  his  wife — could  guess  at.     Purely 


58         THE    NEMESIS    OF   FROUDE 

in  the  interests  of  the  frank  biography,  Miss  Jews- 
bury,  hearing  that  Froude  was  to  write  Carlyle's  life, 
hurried  to  him  and  disclosed  that  "  Carlyle  was  one 
of  those  persons  who  ought  never  to  have  married," 
and,  like  a  flower  that  perishes  in  the  blossoming, 
Froude  tells  us,  she  died  soon  after.  But  of  course, 
Froude  is  wrong,  for,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  she 
survived  seven  years  after  her  revelation.  This 
unmarried  lady  went  to  Froude,  who  was  not  a 
medical  man,  and  soiled  the  memory  of  the  man 
towards  whom  she  had  professed  undying  gratitude, 
and  Froude  is  not  ashamed  to  say  that  she  entered 
on  "  curious  details."  We  need  not  suppose  that  in 
doing  so  she  suffered  from  maidenly  embarrassment, 
or  was  suffused  with  blushes,  for  we  have  it  on 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  authority  that  she  had  herself  allowed 
that  she  had  "  absolutely  no  sense  of  decency,"  and 
that  her  tendency  towards  "  the  unmentionable  " 
was  too  strong  to  be  stayed.  She  informed  Froude 
that  Carlyle's  extraordinary  temper,  which  as  he 
grew  older  and  more  famous  became  more  violent 
and  overbearing,  was  a  consequence  of  his  organisa- 
tion, that  Mrs.  Carlyle  never  forgave  the  injury 
done  her  in  her  marriage,  and  that  her  disappointed 
longing  for  children  had  been  at  the  bottom  of  all 
their  quarrels  and  unhappiness. 

"  I  have  never  been  curious  about  family  secrets," 
says  Froude,  "  and  have  always  as  a  rule  of  my 
life  declined  to  listen  to  communications  which 
were  no  business  of  mine,"  and  yet  he  seems  to 
have  opened  his  ears  widely  to  Miss  Jewsbury's 
unpleasant  family  communication.     That  communi- 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         59 

cation  was  made  to  him  in  1873,  and  must  have 
been  always  present  to  his  mind  while  writing 
"  The  Life  of  Carlyle,"  and  yet  in  that  life  he  says, 
"  I  for  myself  concluded,  though  not  till  after  long 
hesitation,  that  there  should  be  no  reserve,  and 
therefore  I  have  practised  none."  .  .  .  .  "  To  have 
been  reticent  would  have  implied  that  there  was 
something  to  hide,  and  taking  Carlyle  all  in  all, 
there  never  was  a  man,  I  at  least  never  knew  one, 
whose  conduct  in  life  would  better  bear  the  fiercest 
light  that  could  be  thrown  upon  it."  ....  "There 
ought  to  be  no  mystery  about  Carlyle,  and  there  is 
no  occasion  for  mystery."  And  the  man  who 
penned  these  sentences  in  1883  is  he  who  wrote  in 
1887,  "The  worst  of  these  faults  [Carlyle's  faults] 
I  have  concealed  hitherto,"  and  who  then  and  there 
placed  on  record,  evidently  with  a  view  of  its  being 
ultimately  uncovered  to  the  public  gaze,  a  mystery, 
which  he  had  concealed,  but  which  he  believed  had 
dominated  and  clouded  the  life  of  the  man  whose 
entirely  candid  biographer  he  professed  himself 
to  have  been. 

Delicacy  forbids  that  we  should  here  discuss 
Froude's  mystery  or  Miss  Jewsbury's  communi- 
cation. They  have  been  fully  examined  in  the 
pages  of  a  medical  journal,  where  alone  they  could 
be  properly  considered,  and  we  believe  we  may  say 
they  have  been  proved  to  have  been  the  offspring 
of  a  prurient  imagination.  There  is  no  truth  in  them. 
The  evidence  of  their  falsity  is  absolutely  conclusive. 
The  use  made  of  them  by  Froude  and  his  representa- 
tives must  be  regarded  as  deplorable  and  a  stain  on 


6o         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

English  literature.  There  was  no  corroboration  of 
Miss  Jewsbury's  statement.  Not  one  line  or  word 
could  she  point  to  in  all  her  confidential  corre- 
spondence with  Mrs.  Carlyle,  extending  over  a 
quarter  of  a  century,  or  in  Mrs.  Carlyle's  secret 
Journal  and  most  retired  communings  with  herself, 
when  her  bitterness  against  her  husband  was  at  its 
height,  giving  the  faintest  colour  to  the  disclosure. 
It  depended  entirely  on  her  recollection  of  alleged 
conversations  with  Mrs.  Carlyle,  to  support  which 
she  could  produce  no  collateral  evidence;  and  yet 
without  the  smallest  confirmation  Froude  accepted 
her  wild  and  whirling  words.  He  did  not  think  it 
necessary  to  apply  any  tests,  although  he  regarded 
the  statement,  not  as  a  bit  of  idle  talk,  but  as  of 
vital  moment,  and  allowed  it  to  tincture  and  control 
his  whole  biography  of  Carlyle.  The  substance  of 
it  has  been  concealed  until  now,  but  emanations  from 
it  have  been  for  years  floating  about.  Rumour  has 
given  currency  to  Miss  Jewsbury's  slander,  for  slander 
it  must  be  called  ;  as,  rightly  or  wrongly,  a  certain 
degree  of  opprobrium  does  attach  to  the  organisation 
Miss  Jewsbury  ascribed  to  Carlyle,  with  which 
certain  intellectual  disabilities  are  often  associated. 

All  readers  of  Carlyle  must  allow  that  his 
writings  are  characterised  by  splendid  virility,  and 
that  he  was  every  inch  a  man.  The  Carlyles  lived 
on  a  higher  plane  than  Froude  conceived.  Their 
married  life  of  forty  years'  duration  was  essentially 
beautiful.  It  was  not  blessed  with  offspring.  It 
was  chequered,  as  all  married  lives  are,  with  cares, 
anxieties    and    sorrows,    it    was    ruffled    by   angry 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         61 

breezes,  it  was  shadowed  by  sickness,  which  at  one 
time  gathered  into  a  thunder-cloud,  but  it  was 
irradiated  throughout  by  the  pure  white  light  of 
wholesome  human  love. 

It  seems  almost  a  profanation  to  quote  from  the 
letters  which  passed  between  Carlyle  and  Jane 
Welsh  during  their  courtship,  and  between  Carlyle 
and  his  wife  during  the  early  years  of  their  married 
life,  but  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  these  are 
already  on  record,  having  been  published  by 
Froude,  and  they  certainly  throw  a  pleasing  light 
on  the  relations  which  subsisted  between  them. 

During  their  engagement  Jane  Welsh  wrote  to 
Carlyle,  after  a  visit  to  Hoddam  Hill,  "  I  love  you, 
tenderly,  devotedly."  "  I  am  yours,  oh  !  that  you 
knew  how  wholly  yours,"  in  response  to  some  ardent 
expression  of  Carlyle's,  whose  anticipations  of 
matrimony  were  normal  enough.  "  Here,"  he  wrote 
from  Scotsbrig,  "are  two  swallows  in  the  corner 
of  my  window,  that  have  taken  a  house  this  summer  ; 
and  in  spite  of  drought  and  bad  crops  are  bringing 
up  a  family  together  with  the  highest  contentment 
and  unity  of  soul.  Surely,  surely  Jane  Welsh  and 
Thomas  Carlyle  here  as  they  stand  have  in  them 
conjunctly  the  wisdom  of  many  swallows.  Let 
them  exercise  it  then,  in  God's  name,  and  live 
happy  as  these  birds  of  passage  are  doing."  Mrs. 
Carlyle's  letters  after  the  marriage,  and  indeed  at 
every  period  of  their  married  life,  bear  no  trace  of 
disappointment.  Six  weeks  after  her  marriage  she 
wrote  to  her  mother-in-law,  "  We  are  really  very 
happy ;  and   when   he    falls   upon   some   work   we 


62         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

shall  be  still  happier.  Indeed,  I  should  be  very- 
stupid  or  very  thankless,  if  I  did  not  congratulate 
myself  every  hour  of  the  day  on  the  lot  which  it 
has  pleased  Providence  to  assign  to  me.  My 
husband  is  'so  kind,  so,  in  all  respects,  after  my 
own  heart !  " 

During  one  of  her  first  separations  from  him, 
when  visiting  her  mother  at  Templand,  she  addresses 
him,  "  Kindest  and  dearest  of  husbands,  Are  you 
thinking  you  are  never  to  see  my  sweet  face  any 
more  ?  .  .  .  I  wish  I  were  back  to  see  it  and  to 
give  you  a  kiss  for  every  minute  I  have  been 
absent.  .  .  .  Dearest,  I  do  love  you.  God  bless 
you,  my  Darling. — Ever !  ever  your  true  Wife." 

Again  she  wrote  from  Templand  within  two 
years  of  their  marriage,  "  Goody,  Goody,  dear 
Goody.  You  said  you  would  weary,  and  I  do  hope 
in  my  heart  you  are  wearying.  It  will  be  so  sweet 
to  make  it  all  up  to  you  in  kisses  when  I  return. 
You  will  take  me  and  hear  all  my  bits  of  experiences, 
and  your  heart  will  beat  when  you  find  how  I  have 
longed  to  return  to  you."  Are  these  the  utterances 
of  an  amatively  disappointed  and  mortified  wife  ? 

Carlyle's  letters  to  his  wife  are  not  less  tenderly 
and  naturally  affectionate  than  hers  to  him.  His 
first  letter  to  her,  when  they  were  parted  for  the 
first  time  since  their  marriage,  is  dated  16th  April, 
1827,  and  begins  thus:  "Dearest  Wife, — What 
strange  magic  is  in  that  word,  now  that  for  the  first 
time  I  write  it  to  you.  I  promised  that  I  would  think 
of  you  sometimes ;  which  truly  I  have  done  many 
times,  or  rather  all  times,  with  a  singular  feeling  of 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         63 

astonishment,  as  if  a  new  light  had  risen  on  me 
since  we  parted,  as  if,  until  now,  I  had  never 
known  how  precious  my  own  dearest  little  Goody 
was  to  me,  and  what  a  real  an^el  of  a  creature 
she  was.  I  could  bet  a  sovereign  that  you 
love  me  twice  as  well  as  ever  you  did ;  for 
experience  in  this  matter  has  given  me  insight. 
Would  I  were  back  to  you,  and  my  own  Jane's 
heart  would  beat  against  her  husband's."  Froude 
prints  Mrs.  Carlyle's  reply  to  the  foregoing,  but  with 
characteristic  alterations.  He  puts  a  cold  "you" 
where  Mrs.  Carlyle  has  written  "  Darling ; "  he 
puts  "  my  husband  "  where  Mrs.  Carlyle  has  written 
"  my  dearest  husband  ;  "  and  he  omits  the  amatory 
ending,  "God  keep  you,  my  dear  good  husband. 
Write  and  love  me.     Your  own  Goody." 

Another  letter  in  early  wedlock  runs  thus : 
"  Not  unlike  what  the  drop  of  water  from  Lazarus's 
finger  might  have  been  to  Dives  in  the  flame 
was  my  dearest  Goody's  letter  to  her  Husband 
yesterday  afternoon.  .  .  .  No,  I  do  not  love  you  in 
the  least ;  only  a  little  sympathy  and  admiration,  and 
a  certain  esteem,  nothing  more ! — O  my  dear,  best 
wee  woman  ! — But  I  will  not  say  a  word  of  all  this 
till  I  whisper  it  in  your  ear  with  my  arms  round 
you."  Is  this  the  language  of  an  impotent  man 
addressing  the  woman  to  whom  he  has  done  a 
grievous  wrong  which  she  is  bitterly  resenting  ? 

Miss  Ann  Carlyle  Aitken  and  Miss  Margaret 
Carlyle  Aitken,  now  living  in  Dumfries,  recall  that, 
twice  whilst  at  Craigenputtock,  Mrs.  Carlyle  con- 
sulted   their  mother,   the  late   Mrs.   Aitken,   about 


64        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

her  maternal  hopes,  which  alas  !  came  to  nought ; 
and  the  late  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  when,  on 
her  aunt's  death,  she  became  her  uncle's  com- 
panion, was  much  touched  to  find  in  a  drawer  at 
Cheyne  Row  a  little  bundle  of  baby  clothes  made 
by  Mrs.  Carlyle's  own  hands.  This  reminds  us  of 
Carlyle's  pathetic  and  significant  allusion  in  the 
"  Reminiscences"  to  the  child's  chair  which  his  wife 
had  herself  used  when  young,  and  kept  in  her  house 
with  feelings  no  woman  can  fail  to  understand. 
"  Her  little  bit  of  a  first  chair,  its  wee,  wee  arms, 
etc.,  visible  to  me  in  the  closet  at  this  moment,  is 
still  here  and  always  was ;  I  have  looked  at  it 
hundreds  of  times,  from  of  old  with  many  thoughts. 
No  daughter  or  son  of  hers  was  to  sit  there  ;  so  it 
had  been  appointed  us,  my  Darling.  I  have  no 
Book  thousandth-part  so  beautiful  as  Thou;  but 
these  were  our  only  '  Children,' — and  in  a  true  sense 
they  were  verily  ours  ;  and  will  perhaps  live  some 
time  in  the  world,  after  we  are  both  gone  ; — and  be 
of  no  damage  to  the  poor  brute  chaos  of  a  world, 
let  us  hope !  The  Will  of  the  Supreme  shall  be 
accomplished.     Amen" 

In  the  epitaph  in  Haddington  Churchyard  Jane 
Welsh  is  described,  not  as  the  faithful  companion, 
but  as  "the  spouse  of  Thomas  Carlyle,"  "for  forty 
years  the  true  and  ever-loving  helpmate  of  her 
husband."  Carlyle  was  a  true  man,  no  hypocrite  or 
slave  to  convention,  and  he  would  not  have  used 
these  words  had  Jane  Welsh  never  been  his  spouse 
in  any  true  sense,  but  his  ill-used  thrall  who  had 
been  often  on  the  point  of  leaving  him. 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         65 

To  any  one  with  a  spark  of  knowledge  of  human 
nature,  Carlyle's  long  and  passionate  mourning  for 
his  wife,  his  lonesome  visits  to  her  grave,  where  he 
knelt  down  and  reverently  kissed  the  green  mound, 
must  betoken  a  tenderer  tie  than  mere  platonic 
fellowship. 

A  word  may  be  said  on  one  or  two  of  the 
deductions  drawn  by  Froude  from  Miss  Jewsbury's 
extraordinary  statement.  We  are  assured  that  it 
was  Mrs.  Carlyle's  disappointed  longing  for  children 
that  was  at  the  bottom  of  all  the  domestic  unhappiness 
and  quarrels  at  Cheyne  Row.  How  much  exagger- 
ated by  Froude  that  unhappiness  and  these  quarrels 
were  has  been  already  shown.  How  little  Mrs. 
Carlyle's  unfulfilled  maternal  hopes  had  to  do  with 
any  asperities  that  did  exist,  may  now  be  indicated 
merely  to  illustrate  Froude's  incomprehension  of 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  character.  A  child  at  Cheyne  Row 
would  have  been  an  unspeakable  boon  and  blessing, 
but  Mrs.  Carlyle  had  probably  during  the  greater 
part  of  her  life  there  no  very  strong  desire  for  its 
arrival.  In  the  early  days  at  Craigenputtock  "  she 
had  the  passions  of  her  kind,"  and  longed  for  a 
child,  but  it  was  only  when  they  made  up  their 
minds  that  there  was  not  likely  to  be  a  family,  that 
the  Carlyles  determined  to  remove  to  London,  and 
there  Mrs.  Carlyle  soon  became  involved  in  ambi- 
tious projects,  with  the  fulfilment  of  which  the 
claims  of  the  nursery  must  have  interfered.  Like 
some  of  the  fashionable  women  of  the  day,  she 
became  more  alive  to  the  drawbacks  than  to  the 
pleasures  of  motherhood.     She  had  no  great  liking 


66        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

for  children,  and  there  is  not  to  be  found  in  her 
writings  a  single  affectionate  reference  to  them.  She 
calls  them  "wersh  gorbs  "  and  "insipid  offspring," 
and,  writing  to  Mrs.  Russell,  she  exclaimed,  "  Gra- 
cious !  what  a  luck  I  had  no  daughters  to  guide." 
There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  want  of 
children  seriously  ruffled  Mrs.  Carlyle's  equanimity 
at  Cheyne  Row. 

Three  times  over  Froude  informs  us  that  Mrs. 
Carlyle  had  resolved  to  leave  her  husband.  '■  One 
had  heard  that  she  had  often  thought  of  leaving 
Carlyle,  and  as  if  she  had  a  right  to  leave  him  if  she 
pleased."  "She  had  often  resolved  to  leave  Car- 
lyle. He,  of  course,  always  admitted  that  she  was 
at  liberty  to  go  if  she  pleased."  "  She  had  definitely 
made  up  her  mind  to  go  away,  and  even  to  marry 
another  person."  But,  in  order  to  marry  another 
person,  she  would  have  had  to  divorce  Carlyle,  or 
obtain  a  decree  of  nullity  of  marriage  ;  and  with  his 
inimitable  inconsistency,  a  little  further  on,  Froude 
says,  "  She  would  not  make  a  scandal  by  revealing 
the  truth  and  dissolving  the  marriage,  but  once,  at 
least,  she  had  resolved  to  put  herself  out  of  the  way 
altogether."  Which  is  it  to  be,  desertion,  divorce 
or  suicide  ?  Froude  cannot  be  allowed  to  juggle 
with  all  three.  Mrs.  Carlyle  contemplated  suicide 
even  before  her  marriage,  and  many  times  after  it, 
but  that  she  had  ever,  as  is  alleged  by  Froude, 
made  up  her  mind  to  go  to  Scotland  by  sea  and 
drop  off  the  stern  of  the  steamer  cannot  be  believed. 
It  is  one  of  Geraldine  Jewsbury's  stories,  and  is, 
of  course,  apocryphal.     Mrs.  Carlyle  had  plenty  of 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         67 

morphia  and  henbane  and  prussic  acid  and  chloro- 
form, and  could  have  made  away  with  herself, 
without  going  to  sea,  of  which  she  had  always  a 
horror.  It  was  Froude's  lack  of  humour,  a  saving 
quality — the  essence  of  which  is  sensibility  ;  warm, 
tender  fellow-feeling  with  all  forms  of  existence — 
of  which  he  was  entirely  destitute,  that  led 
him  into  the  ridiculous  canard  about  Mrs.  Carlyle 
running  away  and  marrying  another  person  ;  the 
sole  discoverable  origin  of  it  being  this  passage  in 
one  of  her  letters  to  Mrs.  Russell,  "  Do  be  so  good 
as  to  give  Mr.  Dobbie  an  emphatic  kiss  from  me, 
for  if  Mr.  C.  become  unendurable  with  his  eternal 
Frederick,  I  intend  running  away  with  Mr.  Dobbie 
to  the  backwoods,  or  wherever  he  likes."  If  Froude 
had  made  a  little  inquiry,  he  would  have  discovered 
that  Mr.  Dobbie  was  Mrs.  Russell's  father,  a 
reverend  gentleman  then  in  his  eightieth  year.  It 
was  probably  confusion  of  ideas  that  betrayed 
Froude  into  his  accusation  against  Carlyle  of  cruelty, 
in  retorting  to  his  wife,  when  she  told  him  how  near 
leaving  him  she  had  been,  "  Well,  I  do  not  know 
that  I  should  have  missed  you  ;  I  was  very  busy 
just  then  with  my  Cromwell,"  words  which  hurt  her, 
he  says,  more  than  any  others  she  had  ever  heard 
from  him.  But  if  we  are  to  believe  all  Froude  has 
told  us,  these  words  were  mild,  compared  with  his 
many  savage  onslaughts  on  her,  and  the  truth  seems 
to  be  that  Froude  has  applied  to  Carlyle  and  his  wife 
a  story  which  Carlyle  used  to  tell,  and  at  which  his 
wife  laughed  merrily.  It  was  the  story  of  a  North 
of  England  farmer,  whose  wife,  with  whom  he  had 

f  2 


68         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

had  a  tiff,  left  him  and  went  back  to  her  parents, 
but  soon  tired  of  the  separation  and  returned  home. 
Meeting  her  husband,  she  addressed  him  thus  :  <l  I'se 
back  again,  thou  sees  !  "  to  which  her  husband  replied, 
"  Back  again  ?     I  never  kenned  thou  was  away  ! ,: 

That  Mrs.  Carlyle,  whatever  she  may  have  said 
in  her  tempestuous  moods,  ever  seriously  harboured 
the  idea  of  leaving  her  husband,  no  one  who  has 
conned  her  letters  will  believe.  In  1844,  before 
there  was  any  Lady  Ashburton  on  the  scene,  she 
wrote  to  him,  "  I  am  always  wondering  since  I 
came  here  how  I  can  even  in  my  angriest  moods 
talk  about  leaving  you  for  good  and  all  ;  for  to  be 
sure,  if  I  were  to  leave  you  to-day  on  that  principle, 
I  should  need  absolutely  to  go  back  to-morrow  to 
see  how  you  were  taking  it."  All  the  letters  written 
both  by  Carlyle  and  his  wife  during  their  temporary 
separations  teem  with  affectionate  anticipations  of 
reunion. 

Froude's  third  specific  charge  against  Carlyle  is 
that  he  used  personal  violence  to  his  wife.  Carlyle, 
he  tells  us,  when  examining  his  wife's  papers  after 
her  death,  "  found  a  remembrance  in  her  Diary  of 
the  blue  marks  which  in  a  fit  of  passion  he  had  once 
inflicted  on  her  arms.  ...  As  soon  as  he  could 
collect  himself  he  put  together  a  memoir  of  her, 
in  which  with  deliberate  courage  he  inserted  the 
incriminating  passages  (by  me  omitted)  of  her  Diary, 
the  note  of  the  blue  marks  among  them,  and  he 
added  an  injunction  of  his  own  that  however  stern 
and  tragic  that  record  might  be,  it  was  never  to  be 
destroyed." 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         69 

Now  all  this  is  fiction — a  tissue  of  ingeniously- 
concocted  fiction,  and  we  can  only  suppose  that 
in  writing  it  Froude  anticipated  that  when  his 
"  Apologia  "  was  given  to  the  world  there  would  be 
no  one  who  would  care  to  take  the  trouble  to 
examine  too  minutely  into  the  foundation  of  his 
plausible  tale.  He  conveys  to  us,  that  it  was  from 
Carlyle  he  derived  his  knowledge  that  the  two  blue 
marks  were  due  to  his  violence,  and  yet  two  years 
later  we  find  him  asking  an  explanation  of  them 
from  Miss  Jewsbury,  who  of  course  remembered 
them  only  too  well,  "  The  marks  were  made  by 
personal  violence,"  said  she. 

It  is  in  itself  suspicious  that  Froude  does  not 
quote  the  exact  words  of  the  incriminating  passage 
in  the  Diary.  We  are  able  to  supply  this  omission. 
This  was  the  entry.  "  26th  June.  Nothing  to 
record  to-day  but  two  blue  marks  on  the  wrist." 
That  is  all.  The  previous  entry  for  24th  June 
records  a  visit  to  Kensington  Palace  to  see  the 
old  German  pictures,  and  a  family  party  at  Lady 
Charlotte  Portal's  at  which  she  was  accompanied  by 
Mr.  Carlyle.  The  following  entry  for  June  27th 
records  a  visit  to  Hampstead  with  Miss  Jewsbury 
and  a  dinner  at  the  "  Spaniards."  It  will  be 
observed  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  does  not  say  that  the 
blue  marks  on  her  wrist  (zvrist,  be  it  noted,  not 
"arms"  as  Froude  has  it,  an  important  distinction), 
were  caused  by  her  husband  or  give  any  hint  as  to 
how  they  came  there.  And  that  Carlyle,  after  an 
interval  of  ten  years,  should,  on  reading  the  Diary 
have  connected  the  entry  with  personal  violence  of 


jo        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

his  own  and  have  made  confession  to  Froude,  and 
insisted  on  the  retention  of  the  incriminating  passage 
is  incredible. 

The  Memoir  which  Froude  says  as  soon  as  he 
could  collect  himself,  he  put  together,  was  under- 
taken on  the  occasion  of  his  reading  Miss  Jewsbury's 
"  little  book  of  myths,"  reminiscent  of  Mrs.  Carlyle. 
As  soon  as  the  book  was  sent  to  him  by  Miss  Jews- 
bury,  he  began  to  jot  down,  on  its  vacant  leaves,  his 
corrections  of  the  stories,  and  when  the  book  was 
filled  he  took  another  note  book,  which  had  been 
his  wife's,  and  went  on  writing  down  what  memories 
recurred  to  him  of  her  parentage,  girlhood,  and  life 
beside  him.  These  two  books  constitute  the 
manuscript  of  the  Memoir, — "Jane  Welsh  Carlyle," 
which  was  part  of  the  "  Letters  and  Memorials," 
but  which  Froude,  on  his  own  authority,  published 
as  part  of  the  "  Reminiscences."  The  so-called 
incriminating  passage  was  contained  in  the  later 
portion  of  Mrs.  Carlyle's  Journal,  which  alone  had 
been  discovered  at  the  time,  and  Carlyle  introduced 
the  zvhole  of  this  bodily  into  the  above-mentioned 
note  book  which  had  been  his  wife's,  at  the  proper 
place  in  point  of  time.  He  added  no  injunction  as 
to  the  incriminating  passage,  but  he  prefaced 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  Journal  with  these  words  :  "  But  in 
1856"  [it  was  in  1856  that  the  Journal  with  the 
so-called  incriminating  passage  was  written],  "  owing 
to  many  circumstances — my  engrossment  otherwise 
(sunk  in  Frederick,  in,  etc.,  etc.,  far  less  exclusively, 
very  far  less  than  she  supposed,  poor  soul !) ; — and 
owing  chiefly,  one  may  fancy,  to  the  deeper  down- 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         71 

break  of  her  own  poor  health,  which  from  this  time, 
as  I  now  see  better,  continued  its  advance  upon  the 
citadel,  or  nervous  system,  and  intrinsically  grew 
worse  : — in  1856,  too  evidently,  to  whatever  owing, 
my  Darling  was  extremely  miserable  !  Of  that 
year  there  is  a  bit  of  private  diary,  by  chance  left 
unburnt ;  found  by  me  since  her  death,  and  not  to 
be  destroyed,  however  tragical  and  sternly  sad  are 
parts  of  it.  She  had  written,  I  sometimes  knew 
(though  she  would  never  show  to  me  or  to  mortal 
any  word  of  them),  at  different  times,  various  bits  of 
diary ;  and  was  even  at  one  time  upon  a  kind  of 

autobiography  (had  not stept  into  it  with  swine's 

foot,  most  intrusively,  though  without  ill  intention — 
finding  it  unlocked  one  day  ; — and  produced  thereby 
an  instantaneous  burning  of  it ;  and  of  all  like  it 
which  existed  at  that  time).  Certain  enough,  she 
wrote  various  bits  of  diary  and  private  record, 
unknown  to  me  ;  but  never  anything  so  sore,  down- 
hearted, harshly  distressed  and  sad  as  this  (right 
sure  am  I  !), — which  alone  remains  as  specimen." 

Now  what  is  there  here  about  "  blue  marks," 
"  incriminating  passage,"  or  "  fit  of  passion  "  ?  The 
words  "  tragical  and  sternly  sad  "  are  not  applied 
by  Carlyle  to  any  incriminating  passage  but  to  the 
whole  Journal,  or  parts  of  it,  and  the  real  signifi- 
cance of  the  Journal,  as  an  outcome  of  nervous  and 
mental  disorder,  he  had  been  compelled  to  recognise. 
He  puts  it  as  euphemistically  as  possible,  but  he 
cannot  shut  his  eyes  to  the  fact  that  his  wife  was 
morbidly  melancholic  at  the  time.  In  June,  1856, 
she  was  labouring  under  profound  despondency,  and 


72         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

Froude,  in  his  letter  of  intimidation  of  April  20th, 
1886,  in  which  he  threatened  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  with  the  publication  of  "  the  blue  marks," 
adds,  "  I  know  also  that  on  this  or  on  some  other 
similar  occasion  Mrs.  Carlyle  had  made  up  her 
mind  to  destroy  herself."  He  knew  very  well — 
for  in  violation  of  decent  reserve  he  had  himself 
published  the  fact — that  Mrs.  Carlyle  had  on  several 
occasions  made  up  her  mind  to  destroy  herself :  he 
knew  very  well  that  she  was  at  this  time  taking 
morphia,  which  is  a  deliriant  as  well  as  an  anodyne 
and  soporific :  he  knew  very  well  that  she  passed 
through  what  her  husband  called  "a  desperate 
time "  and  Dr.  Blakiston  "  hysterical  mania,"  and 
yet  it  never  occurred  to  him  that  two  blue  marks 
on  the  wrist  might  have  come  in  the  humane  exer- 
cise of  necessary  restraint.  Could  <l  two  blue  marks 
on  the  wrist "  suggest  an  assault  to  anyone  but 
Froude  ?  What  warrant  had  he  for  saying  that 
Carlyle  caused  them  in  any  way  ?  Mrs.  Carlyle 
does  not  say  so.  Nowhere  in  her  letters  or  diaries 
is  there  the  remotest  suggestion  of  such  a  thing. 
She  understood  afterwards  how  ill  she  had  been 
at  this  time,  for  exactly  a  month  after  the  surmised 
assault  we  find  her  writing  to  Mrs.  Russell :  "  I 
was  very  poorly  indeed  when  I  left  home  [in  the 
middle  of  July],  but  I  am  quite  another  creature; 
on  the  top  of  this  Hill  with  the  sharp  Fife  breezes 
about  me."  At  the  same  time,  July  29th,  she  is 
writing  to  her  brutal  assailant,  her  husband,  "  Of 
course  I  am  sad  at  times,  at  all  times  sad  as  death, 
but  that  I  am  used  to  and  don't  mind.     And  as  for 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         73 

the  sickness,  it  is  quite  gone  since  the  morning  I 
left  Chelsea."  That  the  two  blue  marks  on  the 
wrist  business  cannot  have  had  any  very  serious 
consequences  may  be  inferred  from  the  facts  that 
within  one  week  of  the  record  of  them  she  gave 
sittings  for  her  portrait,  went  through  the  ordeal  of 
the  dentist's  chair,  and  attended  "  the  most  magnifi- 
cent ball  of  the  season."  It  may  indeed  well  be 
doubted,  whether  the  blue  marks  had  any  such 
significance  as  the  melodramatic  Froude  has  attri- 
buted to  them,  and  ought  not  to  be  regarded  in  a 
comic  rather  than  a  tragic  light.  Mrs.  Carlyle  has 
elsewhere  chronicled  similar  marks  on  Carlyle's 
skin  caused  by  the  operations  of  her  bete  noir, 
the  bug,  if  an  insect  may  be  so  designated,  which, 
in  spite  of  her  vigilance,  several  times  invaded 
5,  Cheyne  Row,  and  her  hunts  after  which  she 
has  described  with  the  exciting  realism  of  one  of  her 
favourite  novelists,  Fenimore  Cooper,  and  the  wrist 
is  a  favourite  point  of  attack  of  the  Cimex  Lectularius. 
Let  us  take  the  tale  of  the  blue  marks  seriously, 
however,  and  put  the  worst  possible  construction  on 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  words,  supposing  that  her  husband  in 
some  domestic  altercation  had  roughly  grasped  her 
wrist,  thus  causing  two  blue  marks  on  her  sensitive 
and  very  bruisable  skin.  Is  it  believable  that  such 
an  incident — not  unknown  even  in  well-regulated 
families — would  rankle  in  his  mind,  after  an  interval 
of  ten  years,  during  the  whole  of  which  his  wife  had 
given  copious  expression  of  her  gratitude  for  his 
unremitting  gentleness  and  loving-kindness,  and  fill 
his  declining  days  with  remorse  as  Froude  affirms  ? 


74         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

Is  it  believable  that  if,  as  Froude  asserts,  it  was 
this  incident,  that  in  the  after  years,  caused  him  so 
much  pain,  he  would  not  have  mentioned  it  amongst 
all  the  unsparing  self-reproaches  in  which  he 
indulged  ?  Never  once  does  he  refer  to  it  in  his 
most  rackingly  retrospective  writings.  Never  once 
did  he  mention  it  to  his  niece,  who  was  his  confidant 
in  his  darkest  days.  According  to  Froude, 
Carlyle's  nobility  of  nature  was  conspicuously 
exhibited  in  the  penitential  reparation  he  resolved 
to  make  to  his  wife's  memory.  But  was  this  man, 
with  his  hatred  of  hypocrisy  and  fearless  sincerity, 
likely  to  content  himself  with  half  an  expiation  ? 
Was  he  likely  to  parade  his  peccadillos  and  hide 
away  his  mortal  sins  ?  Is  it  not  certain  that  if  he 
had  been  guilty  of  any  act  of  violence  towards  his 
wife,  he  would  have  repented  in  dust  and  ashes 
and  confessed  his  fault  ?  The  fact  that,  while 
seizing  on  every  allusion  in  his  wife's  writings  in 
connexion  with  which  he  could  upbraid  himself,  he 
passed  over  the  entry  as  to  the  "two  blue  marks 
on  the  wrist  "  without  comment,  is  a  sufficient  proof 
that  it  had  no  sinister  meaning  for  him,  and 
that  all  that  Froude  says  about  it  must  have  been 
drawn  from  his  imaginary  conversations.  The 
words  that  spring  to  one's  pen  on  reviewing  this 
attempt  to  brand  Carlyle  as  a  brute  are  best  left 
unwritten. 

As  brutality  and  selfishness  were,  according  to 
Froude,  the  keynotes  of  Carlyle's  youth  and  prime, 
remorse  gave  the  tonality  to  his  declining  years. 
When   his   wife    was    no    more,    says    his     gentle 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         75 

biographer,  he  saw  "  that  he  had  made  her  entirely 
miserable ;  that  she  had  sacrificed  her  life  to  him  ; 
and  that  he  had  made  her  a  wretched  return  for 
her  devotion.  .  .  .  For  the  next  four  years  I  never 
walked  with  him  without  his  recurring  to  a  subject 
which  was  never  absent  from  his  mind.  His  conver- 
sation, however  it  opened,  always  drifted  back  into 
a  pathetic  cry  of  sorrow  over  things  which  were 
now  irreparable."  He  suffered  "an  agony  of 
remorse  for  a  long  series  of  faults  which  now  for 
the  first  time  he  saw  in  their  true  light."  All  which 
shows  that  Froude  did  not  understand  the  meaning 
of  the  word  remorse  as  employed  by  Carlyle,  and 
was  incapable  of  entering  into  his  feelings. 
"  Between  the  Carlyles  and  Mr.  Froude,"  as  Mr. 
Augustine  Birrell  justly  observes,  "  there  flowed 
both  Tweed  and  Trent,  and  the  history  of  the 
whole  world."  But  Froude,  unconscious  of  this, 
tried  to  make  his  shallow  notions  the  plummet  of  a 
nature  infinitely  deeper  than  his  own.  It  can  be 
demonstrated  beyond  dispute,  that  what  Froude 
called  remorse  was  simply  poignant  grief,  in  the 
guise  it  so  often  assumes,  in  the  fine-fibred  and 
magnanimous.  Carlyle  was  not  maddened  by  the 
stings  of  conscience,  but  borne  down  by  sorrow, 
on  the  clouds  of  which  he  saw  reflected,  from 
time  to  time,  huge  Brocken  spectres  of  even  his 
minutest  faults  and  failings.  He  nursed  his  sorrow 
to  the  last  and  seemed  to  say,  "  Assuagement,  in 
this  world  there  is  none  for  me.  Obliteration  I 
would  not  have.  My  grief  is  my  only  comfort." 
Death  is  a  mighty  alchemist.     It  transmutes  much. 


76        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

On  the  erring  woman  it  leaves  "only  the  beautiful." 
It  makes  instruments  with  which  to  scourge  us, 
not  only  of  our  pleasant  vices,  but  of  our  paltry 
neglects  and  trivial  trespasses.  When  it  bereaves 
the  aged,  golden  memories  are  converted  into 
leaden  regrets. 

Carlyle  constantly  used  the  word  remorse  some- 
what indiscriminately,  sometimes  in  the  sense  of 
compassionate  regret,  sometimes  of  mere  vexation. 
He  had  "  remorse,"  as  he  calls  it,  when  visiting  the 
grave  of  his  mother,  to  whom  he  had  been  the 
kindest  and  most  devoted  of  sons,  when  he  did  not 
succeed  as  well  as  he  had  expected  in  a  lecture, 
and  when  Froude  came  in  and  interrupted  his 
studies.  In  the  case  of  his  wife  his  remorse  hinged 
on  his  having  failed  adequately  to  estimate  her 
sufferings  and  on  having  bored  her  with  his 
"  Frederick."  "  Oh,  I  was  blind  not  to  see  how 
brittle  was  the  thread  of  noble  celestial  (almost 
more  than  terrestrial)  life ;  how  much  it  was  all  in 
all  to  me,  and  how  impossible  it  should  long  be 
left  with  me."  "  I  had  at  last  conquered  Mollwitz, 
saw  it  all  clear  ahead  and  round  me,  and  took  to 
telling  her  stories  about  it,  in  my  poor  bit  of  joy, 
night  after  night.  I  recollect  she  answered  little, 
though  kindly  always.  Privately,  she  at  that  time 
felt  convinced  she  was  dying  : — dark  winter,  and  such 
the  weight  of  misery,  and  utter  decay  of  strength  ; — 
and  night  after  night,  my  theme  to  her  was  Mollwitz  / 
This  she  owned  to  me,  within  the  last  year  or 
two ; — which  how  could  I  listen  to  without  shame 
and  abasement  ? ':     And  this  was  the  sort  of  thine 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         77 

poured  forth  to  Froude,  "shame  and  abasement," 
for  prosing  about  Mollwitz,  and  Froude,  catching 
at  the  shame  and  abasement,  and  dropping  the 
Mollwitz,  turned  it,  in  his  crooked  imagination, 
into  deep  and  passionate  repentance  for  heinous 
offences  against  his  wife.  The  whole  thing  would 
be  ludicrous,  if  it  were  not  so  shocking.  There  is 
not  to  be  found,  in  all  Carlyle's  writings,  after  the 
death  of  his  wife,  when  he  was  probing  his  heart 
and  memory  to  their  depths,  any  specific  instance 
of  an  offence  against  her  more  heinous  than  his 
refusal  to  shake  hands  with  the  dressmaker  at 
Madam  Elise's  when  she  desired  him  to  do  so  : 
this  "  cruelty "  he  afterwards  called  it.  Mrs. 
Carlyle  had  caught  from  her  husband  the  exaggera- 
tive use  of  the  word  "  remorse,"  for  a  lady  writer  in 
"  Blackwood,"  who  has  recorded  her  reminiscences, 
says  that  when  she  had  upset  a  work-basket  and 
was  rather  profuse  in  her  apologies  Mrs.  Carlyle 
twitted  her  with  her  "delicate  remorses." 

It  was  Carlyle's  septuagenarian  remorse  that 
first  endeared  him  to  Froude.  Up  till  then, 
although  he  had  been  for  years  his  most  obse- 
quious follower,  and  a  constant  guest  at  his  fireside, 
he  had  never  liked  him,  he  admits.  But  now  it 
was  possible,  not  merely  to  admire  but  to  love  him. 
His  sin  had  found  him  out ;  he  repented  and 
resolved  to  make  an  atonement,  which  was  to  con- 
sist in  the  publication  after  his  death  of  a  full  cata- 
logue of  his  misdeeds.  Froude  hailed  this  as  "an 
expiation  so  frank  and  so  complete  that  it  washed 
the  stain  away,"  and  felt  honoured  in  being  appointed 


78         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

Lord  High  Executioner.  He  felt  that  Carlyle's 
"  character  never  could  be  put  fairly  and  honestly 
among  the  records  of  the  great  men  to  whom  he 
belonged  unless  the  faults  were  confessed  and  abso- 
lution granted  on  the  only  fitting  terms."  The 
confession  was  to  be  made  to  the  British  public, 
in  book  form,  but  by  whom  the  absolution  was  to 
be  granted  and  on  what  fitting  terms  are  not 
made  clear.  To  most  men  it  will  seem  that  the 
line  of  conduct  which  Froude  attributes  to  Carlyle, 
and  which  was,  in  his  estimation  noble,  was  abject 
and  cowardly.  Penitence  when  sincere  is  praise- 
worthy, but  it  should  be  indulged  in  in  silence 
and  solitude  and  not  proclaimed  in  lamentations, 
in  the  highway.  Reparation,  where  practicable, 
is  its  sweetest  fruit,  but  it  can  scarcely  be  held 
to  include  an  apology  to  the  injured  person  who 
is  dead,  tendered  in  the  obituary  notice  of  the 
transgressor.  If  Carlyle  had  felt  that  any  public 
acknowledgment  of  his  ill-treatment  of  his  wife  was 
required  of  him,  it  would  have  been  made  while  he 
was  still  alive  to  bear  the  brunt  of  just  condemnation, 
and  not  delayed  till  he  was  beyond  the  reach  of 
censure  in  Ecclefechan  kirk-yard.  He  was  honest 
and  manly  and  never  cringed  before  his  fellow-men, 
and  to  suppose  him  capable  of  a  craven  subterfuge, 
by  way  of  expiation,  is  to  reveal  a  radical  miscon- 
ception of  his  character.  His  pusillanimous  resolve, 
that  the  grave  faults  with  their  miserable  conse- 
quences which  he  had  been  ceaselessly  bemoaning 
for  fifteen  years,  should  be  made  known  when  he 
was  gone  earned  him   Froude's  "  love."     Had  he 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         79 

ever  formed  such  a  resolve  it  must  have  made  him 
despised  by  all  right-minded  persons. 

In  accepting  the  office  of  undertaker  for  Carlyle's 
good  name  and  in  promising  to  smother  his  tomb- 
stone with  wormwood  and  rue,  Froude  felt  that  it 
was  not  unlikely  he  might  incur  "  the  resentment  of 
relations."  Did  it  ever  occur  to  him  what  the 
nearest  of  relations  might  have  had  to  say  to  him  ? 
Edifying,  indeed,  would  have  been  Mrs.  Carlyle's 
expository  notes  on  his  proceedings  had  speech,  out 
of  the  Silences,  been  conceded  to  her  for  just  five 
minutes.  Her  husband's  reputation  was  the  apple 
of  her  eye,  her  most  precious  possession,  that  which 
above  all  things  she  desired  should  remain  untar- 
nished. About  a  week  before  her  death,  when 
congratulating  him  on  his  Rectorial  Address  in 
Edinburgh,  she  wrote  to  him,  "  I  must  repeat  what 
I  have  said  before — that  the  best  part  of  this  success 
is  the  general  feeling  of  personal  goodwill  that 
pervades  all  they  say  and  write  about  you.  Even 
'  Punch '  cuddles  you,  and  purrs  over  you,  as  if  you 
were  his  favourite  son."  How  proud  she  was  of 
him  !  "I  tore  it  open,"  she  wrote  [the  telegram 
announcing  the  success  of  the  Address],  -'  and  read, 
■  From  John  Tyndall.'  (Oh,  God  bless  John  Tyndall 
in  this  world  and  the  next !)  '  A  perfect  triumph  ! ' 
And  strangely  enough  there  was  at  this  time  an 
anticipatory  glimpse  of  the  evil  that  was  in  store. 
Three  days  before  her  death  she  read  a  "  Memoir  " 
of  her  husband  attached  to  a  pirated  issue  of  his 
Rectorial  Address  which  he  had  sent  to  her,  and 
she  thus  wrote  to  him  about  it :  "If  you  call  that 


8o        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

'  laudatory '  you  must  be  easily  pleased.  I  never  read 
such  stupid,  vulgar  janners.  The  last  of  calumnies 
that  I  should  ever  have  expected  to  hear  uttered 
about  you  was  this  of  your  going  about  '  filling  the 
laps  of  dirty  children  with  comfits.'  Idiot !  My  half- 
pound  of  barley  sugar  made  into  such  a  legend  !  The 
wretch  has  even  failed  to  put  the  right  number  to 
the  sketch  of  the  house — '  No.  7  ! '  "  Decidedly  the 
Memoir,  with  its  inaccuracies,  its  legends,  itsjanners, 
was  an  appropriate  forerunner  of  Froude's  "  Life." 

The  three  specific  charges  against  Carlyle  which 
we  have  analysed  and  proved  worthless,  Froude 
spoke  of  as  the  secrets  of  Cheyne  Row.  They 
were  divulged  to  him  by  Miss  Jewsbury ;  but  he 
found  from  anonymous  letters  that  they  were  no 
secrets  at  all ;  and  that  Froude  should  have  given 
heed  to  anonymous  letters  is  only  less  surprising 
than  that  the  anonymous  miscreants  should  have 
taken  the  trouble  to  apprise  him  of  the  covert 
nastiness  of  Cheyne  Row,  rather  than  any  other  of 
Carlyle's  friends.  And,  indeed,  Froude's  attitude 
towards  these  secrets,  as  described  by  himself,  is 
unintelligible.  They  were  secrets  which  were  no 
secrets  at  all,  and  he  painfully  debated  within  himself 
whether  he  should  conceal  them.  If  he  suppressed 
them  he  made  his  biography  a  mere  panegyric.  If 
he  published  them  he  might  incur  resentment. 
"What  was  I  to  make  of  them?"  he  piteously 
exclaims.  At  one  time  he  confesses  he  had  drifted 
to  "  the  cowardly  conclusion "  that  he  would  sup- 
press everything  unpleasant,  dwelling  "  on  the 
brightest  and  best  in  Carlyle  and   passing  lightly 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         81 

over  the  rest,"  thus  baulking  his  illustrious  friend  of 
that  post-mortem  atonement  on  which  he  had  set 
his  heart.  At  another  time  he  felt  that  concealment 
would  be  wrong,  that  faults  frankly  confessed  are 
frankly  forgiven,  that,  as  Carlyle  himself  had  taught 
him,  it  is  "  the  truth  shall  make  you  free  "  in  bio- 
graphy as  in  everything  else,  and  so  he  resolved 
to  disburthen  his  friendly  bosom  of  the  perilous 
stuff  that  weighed  upon  his  heart. 

Now,  the  frank  biography  is  unquestionably 
desirable ;  but  even  the  frank  biography  has  its 
limits,  and  has  not  hitherto  been  held  to  include 
details  of  physiological  functions  or  stenographic 
records  of  every  unguarded  and  hasty  word.  It 
should  not  pander  to  unworthy  curiosity.  In  every 
human  life  there  is  a  highest  and  a  lowest  which 
even  the  frankest  biography  should  leave  untouched  ; 
a  Shechinah  which  should  remain  enshrined  in 
cloud,  a  scullery  which  should  be  hidden  from  view. 
In  ignoring  this,  and  in  laying  bare,  with  shameless 
incontinence,  the  most  sacred  emotions  and  private 
details  in  the  life  of  his  dead  friend,  Froude  has 
exposed  himself  to  the  full  force  of  Tennyson's 
withering  denunciation  of  those  who  traffic  in  post- 
humous tittle-tattle  and  defamation. 

"  For  now  the  Poet  cannot  die, 
Nor  leave  his  music  as  of  old, 
But  round  him  ere  he  scarce  be  cold 
Begins  the  scandal  and  the  cry : 

"  '  Proclaim  the  faults  he  would  not  show  : 
Break  lock  and  seal :  betray  the  trust : 
Keep  nothing  sacred  :   'tis  but  just 
The  many-headed  beast  should  know.' " 

G 


82         THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

But  it  is  not  only  the  too  frank  biography  that 
in  Froude's  case  is  complained  of,  but  the  false  and 
grisly  biography,  that  misrepresents  its  subject  and 
perpetuates,  if  it  does  not  originate,  dishonouring 
false  witness  regarding  him.  "A  well-written  Life," 
said  Carlyle,  "  is  almost  as  rare  as  a  well-spent 
one."     Never  was  Life  worse  written  than  his  own. 

Froude  complains  that  in  preparing  for  his  bio- 
graphy of  Carlyle  he  was  much  embarrassed  by  the 
vacillation  of  Carlyle  himself,  and  in  this  connexion 
it  is  requisite  to  examine  his  statements  as  to  the 
biographical  material  placed  in  his  hands.  It  was 
in  1 87 1,  he  says,  that  Carlyle,  without  a  word  of 
warning,  brought  him  his  wife's  letters  and  a  copy 
of  the  Memoir  of  her  which  he  had  written,  made 
him  a  gift  of  them,  and  asked  him  to  publish  them 
or  not  as  he  thought  fit,  when  he  was  gone  ;  and  it 
seems  highly  probable  that  in  this,  as  in  so  many 
other  matters,  Froude's  memory  played  him  false,  for 
if  Carlyle  had  made  a  gift  of  these  papers  to  him  in 
1871,  it  is  remarkable  that  he  should  specifically 
bequeath  them  to  him  by  will  in  1873.  Froude  does 
not  allege  that  these  manuscripts  were  ever  seen  by 
Carlyle  after  he  handed  them  to  him,  and  yet  they 
contain  notes  by  Carlyle,  dated  1873.  It  was  in 
that  year  (1873),  Froude  alleges,  that  Carlyle  sent 
him  in  a  box  a  collection  of  letters,  diaries,  memoirs, 
miscellanies  of  endless  sorts,  with  a  request  that  he 
would  undertake  his  biography,  for  which  these  were 
the  materials,  and  yet  in  that  very  year  Carlyle  left 
by  will  to  his  brother  John  all  his  manuscripts, 
except  the  Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         83 

Carlyle,  given  to  Froude,  and  directed  that  in  all 
such  matters  he  wished  his  brother  John  to  be 
regarded  as  his  second  and  surviving  self. 

At  the  very  moment  when  Froude  represents 
Carlyle  as  thrusting  papers  upon  him,  and  insisting 
on  his  undertaking  the  unsought-for  task  of  com- 
posing his  biography,  Carlyle  wrote  in  his  will, 
"  Express  biography  of  me  I  had  really  rather  that 
there  should  be  none." 

Froude  stumbled  over  dates  in  this  matter  in 
an  inexplicable  way.  It  is  in  the  highest  degree 
unlikely  that  papers  of  any  kind  were  put  in  his 
hands  until  1873  ;  and  then  it  was  that,  after 
the  making  of  the  will,  the  Letters  and  Memorials 
of  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle,  which  were  to  Carlyle,  in 
his  bereaved  state,  "  of  endless  value,"  were  given 
to  him  in  order  that  he  might  take  "  precious 
charge  of  them,  and,  together  with  John  Forster 
and  Dr.  John  Carlyle,"  the  other  Executors, 
"make  earnest  survey"  of  them,  and  of  the  auto- 
biographic notes  attached  to  them,  and  decide 
whether  they  or  any  portion  of  them  should  be 
published.  It  was  not  until  1877  and  the  following 
years  that  the  biographical  materials,  which  Froude 
alleges  were  given  to  him  in  1873,  were  sent  to 
him,  not  by  Carlyle,  but  by  Miss  Mary  Aitken,  to 
whom  they  were  given  in  1875,  and  who,  at  the 
request  of  her  uncle,  gave  the  loan  of  them  to 
Froude,  for  biographical  purposes.  After  Carlyle's 
death  Froude  disputed  the  gift  to  Miss  Mary  Aitken 
in  1875.  He  tried  to  discredit  her  statement  by 
urging  that  she  could  only  say  that  the  manuscripts 

G  2 


84        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

had  been  given  to  her  by  word  of  mouth,  and  had 
no  writing  to  show,  overlooking  the  fact  that  he 
was  himself  in  exactly  the  same  position,  and  that 
Carlyle's  commission  to  him  to  write  his  biography 
was  by  word  of  mouth,  and  that  he  had  no  writing 
to  show  for  that  or  for  any  of  his  other  proceedings 
in  dealing  with  these  papers.  He  had  no  credentials 
to  exhibit.  Whenever  exception  was  taken  to  any 
step  he  took,  he  pleaded  oral  instructions  from 
Carlyle. 

If  the  decision  on  this  disputed  point  had  had 
to  be  given,  solely  on  the  conflicting  statements  of 
Froude  and  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  no  one,  looking 
into  the  matter,  would  have  hesitated  to  give  a 
verdict  in  favour  of  the  latter.  Froude's  inaccuracy 
and  reminiscent  extravagances  were  proverbial. 
To  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  a  special  gift  was 
bequeathed  in  the  codicil  to  Carlyle's  will  "  as 
a  testimony  of  the  trust  I  repose  in  her,  and 
as  a  mark  of  my  esteem  for  her  honourable, 
veracious  and  faithful  character,  and  a  memorial 
of  all  the  kind  and  ever  faithful  service  she  has 
done  me." 

But  the  gift  of  the  manuscripts  in  1875  to 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  did  not  rest  on  her  un- 
supported recollection.  They  had  been  bequeathed 
by  the  will  of  1873,  together  with  the  Furniture, 
plate,  linen,  china,  books,  prints,  pictures  and  other 
effects  in  the  house  at  Cheyne  Row  to  Dr.  John 
Carlyle.  But  in  the  Codicil  of  1878,  Dr.  John 
Carlyle,  being  then  sick  unto  death,  the  Furniture, 
plate,    linen,    china,    books,    prints,    pictures    and 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         85 

other  effects  in  the  house,  are  left  to  his  niece, 
Mary  Carlyle  Aitken,  absolutely,  while  no  mention 
is  made  of  the  manuscripts  which  in  the  will  formed 
part  of  the  bequest  to  Dr.  John  Carlyle.  Why  so  ? 
Because  they  had  already  been  disposed  of  and 
given  in  1875  to  Mary  Carlyle  Aitken,  who  had 
been  dealing  with  them.  This  gift  of  these 
manuscripts  to  her  in  1875  was  corroborated  by 
Carlyle  himself  on  several  occasions,  and  was  testi- 
fied to  by  Mr.  Alexander  Carlyle,  Mrs.  Aitken, 
Miss  Ann  Aitken,  Mr.  Allingham,  Mr.  Friedmann, 
Mrs.  Venturi  and  Mrs.  Anstruther ;  and  Mr. 
(now  Lord  Justice)  Cozens-Hardy,  with  the  whole 
case,  on  both  sides,  before  him,  said  that  there 
was  "  good  ground  for  contending  that  the  owner- 
ship of  these  documents  was  not  vested  in  the 
Executors,  but  was  vested  in  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle,  to  whom  they  were  given  in  June,  1875." 
Froude's  contention,  therefore,  in  "  My  Relations 
with  Carlyle,"  that  the  manuscripts  for  the  bio- 
graphy were  given  to  him  by  Carlyle  in  1873,  falls 
to  the  ground,  and  may  be  rebutted  by  what  he 
has  himself  written.  On  the  23rd  of  September, 
1879,  he  wrote  to  Carlyle,  "  I  conclude  from  what 
your  niece  said  in  her  last  letter,  that  you  are 
again  in  London.  We  return  ourselves  in  three 
weeks.  She  implies  that  you  wish  me  to  pro- 
ceed at  once  with  the  task  [the  biography]  which 
you  have  imposed  on  me.  So  of  course  I  will  do 
so.  I  began  it  two  years  ago,  but  I  found  so  many 
injunctions  attached  to  the  letters  by  yourself  that 
there  was  nothing  to  be  done  until   long  after  you 


S6        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

had  yourself  gone."  That  letter  was  written  in 
1879,  and  if  Froude  began  his  biographic  work  two 
years  previously,  that  would  be  in  1877,  or  exactly 
at  the  time  when,  according  to  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle,  the  manuscripts  were  lent  to  him  by  her. 
Froude  is  once  more  wrong  in  stating  that  all  the 
multifarious  materials  for  the  biography  were  sent  to 
him  at  one  time.  The  letters  of  Carlyle  to  his  brother 
Alick  were  sent  in  instalments  during  1878  and  1879, 
and  in  November,  1879,  Mr.  Alexander  Carlyle 
himself  carried  a  bundle  of  them  to  Froude's 
house.  The  letters  to  Dr.  John  Carlyle,  the  most 
voluminous  and  important  of  all,  were  returned  to 
Chelsea  by  his  executor,  and  were  not  delivered  to 
Froude  till  some  months  after  Dr.  Carlyle's  death, 
which  took  place  on  15th  September,  1879.  In 
"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  Froude  says  dis- 
tinctly that  the  materials  for  the  biography  were 
sent  to  him  in  1873  in  a  box.  In  a  letter  to  the 
Times  on  May  9th,  1881,  he  complained  that  these 
materials  had  been  sent  to  him  at  intervals  without 
inventory  or  numerical  lists. 

It  is  hard  to  understand  how  Froude  can  bring 
himself  to  say  that  until  Carlyle  said  to  him  a  year 
before  his  death,  "  When  you  have  done  with  these 
papers  of  mine,  give  them  back  to  Mary,"  he  had 
regarded  them  as  his  own.  He  was  explicitly 
told  when  the  first  papers  were  lent  to  him  in  1877 
that  when  he  had  finished  with  them  they  were  to 
be  returned  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle.  In  Feb- 
ruary, 1879,  when  driving  with  him,  Carlyle  spoke 
to    Froude    about    the    papers,    and    on    coming 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         87 

home  told  his  niece,  "  Froude  perfectly  under- 
stands that  the  papers  are  all  yours,  and  will 
return  them  all  to  you.  He  has  promised  to  do 
so."  In  February,  1880,  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle 
accidentally  discovered  that  Froude  did  not  seem  to 
consider  himself  bound  by  this  condition,  and  at 
once  wrote  to  remind  him  of  it.  On  the  same  day 
on  which  he  received  the  reminder,  Froude  replied, 
"  I  perfectly  understood  that  all  the  papers  were  to 
be  returned  to  you  when  I  had  done  with  them. 
Your  Uncle,  however,  told  me  the  other  day  that 
you  were  expecting  them  now,  and  that  you  thought 
I  must  have  forgotten  about  them."  Two  days 
later  (10th  February,  1880)  he  wrote  again  to  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle,  "It  has,  however,  long  been 
settled  that  you  were  to  have  the  entire  collection 
when  I  had  done  with  it.  Even  if  nothing-  had 
been  arranged  about  it,  I  should  of  course  have 
replaced  it  in  your  hands."  These  admissions, 
made  in  Carlyle's  life-time,  put  it  beyond  cavil 
that  Froude,  who,  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle," 
tells  us  that  until  a  year  before  Carlyle's  death, 
he  had  looked  on  these  papers  as  his  own,  and 
had  been  empowered  to  burn  them  if  he  liked, 
was  at  that  very  time  acknowledging  that  it  had 
been  "  long  settled"  that  they  were  to  be  re- 
turned to  Carlyle's  niece  and  "replaced"  in  her 
hands.  The  power  to  burn  could  only  have  been 
conferred  in  respect  of  the  Letters  and  Memorials 
of  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle,  which  were  undoubtedly 
his,  and  not  in  respect  of  papers,  which  were  lent 
him   by   Mrs.   Alexander  Carlyle,   to  be  employed 


88         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

in  preparing  the  Life,  and  which  were,  he  admits, 
to  be  returned  to  her.  Froude  could  only  use  a 
comparatively  small  portion  of  the  mass  of  papers 
inadvisedly  lent  to  him,  and  he  could  scarcely 
expect  that  his  projected  "  Life  of  Carlyle  "  was  to 
be  the  last  word  on  the  subject. 

But  still  more  unequivocal  acknowledgments 
by  Froude  of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  property 
in  the  manuscripts  are  forthcoming.  He  wrote  to 
the  Times  on  the  25th  February,  1 881,  specifically 
correcting  the  misstatement  he  had  previously 
made,  claiming  the  papers  as  a  gift  from  Carlyle,  for 
in  a  letter  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  of  the  23rd 
February,  1881,  he  said  :  "  As  to  the  Times,  I  think 
I  had  better  write  a  little  note  to  Chinery  (the 
Editor)  to  say  that  by  '  gave '  I  only  meant  '  gave 
in  charge  to  make  use  of,'  and  that  the  MSS.  belong 
to  you."  Accordingly  in  his  Times  letter  of  the 
25th  of  February,  1881,  he  wrote:  "  I  wish  to  add 
that  in  saying  that  Mr.  Carlyle  gave  me  these 
papers  I  did  not  mean  that  he  gave  them  to  me  as 
my  property,  but  that  he  entrusted  me  with  the  use 
of  them.  .  .  .  The  papers  belong  to  his  niece, 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  to  whom  he  directed  me 
to  return  them." 

And  yet  Froude  has  the  audacity — there  is  no 
other  word  for  it — to  say  in  "  My  Relations  with 
Carlyle  "  in  1887  that  it  is  still  "  an  open  question  " 
whether  the  papers-  were  his,  forgetting  that  he  has 
again  and  again  privately  and  publicly  acknow- 
ledged that  they  were  not  his.  Carlyle  had  told 
him   they   were   not    his.      He   had   been    merely 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         89 

"entrusted  with  the  use  of  them,"  as  he  himself 
said  in  his  letter  to  the  Times. 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  had  left  Froude  in 
undisturbed  possession  of  her  papers  until  the  publi- 
cation of  the  "  Reminiscences."  Up  to  that  time 
Froude  was  on  terms  of  intimate  friendship  with 
her  and  her  husband,  and  they  never  doubted  that 
he  would  faithfully  discharge  his  trust.  But  the 
appearance  of  the  "  Reminiscences  "  was  a  shock 
to  them,  and  what  Froude  calls  "the  hailstorm  of 
unfavourable  criticism "  which  the  book  provoked 
made  them  feel  that  it  was  incumbent  on  them  to 
do  something  to  protect  their  uncle's  memory,  and 
to  prevent  further  desecration  of  it.  The  inclusion 
of  the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir  in  the  "  Remini- 
scences," about  which  not  a  word  had  been  said  to 
them,  convinced  them  that  Froude  would  not  be 
bound  by  Carlyle's  directions,  and  could  not  there- 
fore be  safely  entrusted  with  the  more  momentous 
work  of  preparing  the  "  Life."  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle,  who  had  not,  as  Froude  insinuates,  any 
sordid  motives,  but  a  single  eye  to  her  duty 
to  her  uncle  and  her  family  and  to  truth, 
suggested  that  Froude  should  have  associated 
with  him  in  his  labours,  which  he  described 
as  arduous  and  oppressive,  two  or  three  other 
friends  of  Carlyle,  men  of  judgment  and  dis- 
cretion, to  be  agreed  on.  This  proposal  Froude — 
intensely  chagrined  by  the  publication  of  Carlyle's 
prohibition  on  the  publication  of  the  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle  Memoir — strongly  resented.  On  the  9th  of 
May,  1 88 1,  he  wrote  to  the  Times  as  follows  :  "The 


9o        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

Memoir  of  the  late  Mrs.  Carlyle  and  the  collection 
of  her  letters  made  by  Mr.  Carlyle  and  partially  pre- 
pared by  him  for  publication,  are  my  personal  pro- 
perty, given  to  me  to  make  such  use  of  as  might 
seem  good  to  me.  I  am  the  sole  judge  what  parts 
of  them  should  or  should  not  be  printed,  and  neither 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  nor  any  one  else  has  a 
right  to  call  in  question  the  discretion  which 
Mr.  Carlyle  left  with  me  alone.  These  papers, 
which  are  mine,  I  shall  keep.  The  Memoir  is 
published,  the  letters  will  be  published.  I  decline 
to  allow  any  person  or  persons,  whether  friends  of 
Mr.  Carlyle  or  not,  to  be  associated  with  me  in  the 
discharge  of  a  trust  which  belongs  exclusively  to 
myself.  The  remaining  papers,  which  I  was  directed 
to  return  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  as  soon  as  I 
had  done  with  them,  I  will  restore  at  once  to  any 
responsible  person  whom  she  will  empower  to 
receive  them  from  me. 

"  I  have  reason  to  complain  of  the  position  in 
which  I  have  been  placed  with  respect  to  these 
MSS.  They  were  sent  to  me  at  intervals,  without 
inventory  or  even  numerical  list.  I  was  told  that 
the  more  I  burnt  of  them  the  better,  and  they  were 
for  several  years  in  my  possession  before  I  was  even 
aware  that  they  were  not  my  own.  Happily,  I  had 
destroyed  none  of  them,  and  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle 
can  have  them  all  when  she  pleases." 

"  The  remaining  papers,  which  I  zvas  directed  to 
return  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  as  soon  as  I  had 
done  with  the?u,  I  will  restore  at  once  to  any  respon- 
sible per son  whom  she  will  empower  to  receive  them 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         91 

from  me."     "  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  can  have  them 
all  when  she  pleases." 

Here  we  have  a  voluntary,  unequivocal,  uncon- 
ditional offer,  twice  repeated  in  a  letter  to  the  Times. 
A  responsible  person,  her  Solicitor,  empowered  by 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  applied  to  Froude  for  the 
papers  the  following  day.  Froude  refused  to  give 
them  up.  No  explanation  was  given.  He  had 
changed  his  mind.  It  has  since  been  said,  that 
Froude's  co-executor,  Sir  James  Stephen,  objected 
to  the  delivery  of  the  papers,  on  the  ground  of  some 
shadowy  claim  that  the  residuary  legatees  might 
have  upon  them.  That  was  an  after-thought. 
Nothing  was  said  about  it  at  the  time  the  delivery 
was  refused.  Froude's  own  subsequent  explanation 
was  that  he  was  provoked  into  making  the  offer, 
and  had  been  "  worried  into  great  impatience," 
but  it  was  necessary  to  find  some  better  reason 
than  that  for  the  non-fulfilment  of  a  definite  and 
deliberate  offer  made  in  the  columns  of  the  Times, 
and  so  the  co-executor  and  his  objection  came  upon 
the  scene.  That  this  objection  was  not  valid  may 
be  gathered  from  the  way  in  which  Mr.  Cozens- 
Hardy  brushed  aside  any  claim  of  the  executors 
on  these  papers,  and  that  it  was  not  genuine,  may 
be  inferred  from  the  fact,  that  the  offer  remained 
still  unfulfilled,  after  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  had 
undertaken  to  procure  the  assent  of  all  the 
residuary  legatees,  or  to  provide  the  executors 
with  an  indemnity  against  any  possible  claim  that 
might  be  made  against  the  residuary  estate.  If 
the   papers   belonged   to   the    executors   on   behalf 


92         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

of  the  residuary  estate,  one  is  constrained  to  ask 
how  came  it  that  Sir  James  Stephen,  on  behalf 
of  Mr.  Froude,  was  at  this  time  offering  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle  the  profits  of  the  "  Remini- 
scences," which  in  that  case  neither  he  nor  Froude 
had  a  right  to  touch  ?  How  came  it  that  Froude 
appropriated  the  profits  of  the  "  Life,"  which  in  that 
case,  in  part  at  least,  ought  to  have  gone  to  the 
residuary  legatees  ? 

Plain  men  with  non-legal  minds  will  perhaps 
raise  their  eyebrows  a  little  when  they  read  Sir 
James  Stephen's  defence  of  Froude's  breach  of 
promise.  "  You  afterwards  considered  yourself 
entitled,  and  I  entirely  agreed  with  you,  to  refuse  to 
carry  out  the  intention  thus  expressed.  It  had  no 
legal  validity.  It  was  a  mere  statement  of  your 
intention,  and  was  at  the  most  a  voluntary  promise 
founded  on  no  consideration,  made  in  a  moment  of 
irritation,  and  which  did  not  in  any  degree  affect 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  position."  At  all  events 
it  was  a  promise  to  which  Froude  had  called  the 
world  to  bear  witness,  by  publishing  it  in  the  Times, 
and  Sir  James  Stephen's  statement  that  his  delibe- 
rate breach  of  it  in  no  way  affected  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  position  is  incorrect.  It  caused  her  much 
suffering  and  distress,  and  as  things  turned  out, 
although  that  consideration  did  not  weigh  with  her 
at  the  time,  it  deprived  her  of  a  very  large  sum  of 
money  which  went  into  Froude's  pocket.  If  the 
papers  had  been  returned  to  her  she  could  have 
herself  undertaken  the  Biography,  as  Froude  had 
once  said   she  was  well  able  to  do,  or   she  could 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         93 

have  arranged  with  some  other  literary  man 
to  write  it,  retaining  such  a  share  of  the  profits 
as  she  was  fairly  entitled  to,  seeing  that  all  the 
materials  were  undeniably  hers.  Froude  retained 
the  papers  and  wrote  the  "  Life,"  and  all  the  profits 
of  it,  which  were  very  large,  were  his. 

The  fact  remains  that  Froude  deliberately  broke 
his  deliberate  promise.  The  humiliating  position  in 
which  he  thus  placed  himself  does  not  seem  to  have 
been  improved  by  the  excuses  of  his  friends. 

The  Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh  Car- 
lyle  were  absolutely  Froude's  property,  given  and 
bequeathed  to  him  to  do  his  best  and  wisest  with, 
and  to  publish  when  made  ready  for  publication, 
after  what  delay,  seven,  ten  years,  he  might  in  his 
discretion  decide.  The  only  questions  that  arose 
regarding  them  were  whether  they  were  not  pub- 
lished prematurely  and  whether  they  were  wisely 
edited.  Instead  of  waiting  for  seven  years  after 
Carlyle's  death — and  most  people  will,  we  think, 
accept  that  as  the  plain  meaning  of  the  Will,  they 
were  out  within  two  years  of  that  event,  and  "  fit 
editing"  there  was  none.  "  Forster,"  says  Froude, 
"  read  both  memoir  and  letters.  To  me  he  gave 
no  opinion."  His  widow  assured  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  that  Forster  was  altogether  opposed  to  the 
publication  of  either  Letters  or  Memoir,  and  there  can 
be  no  question  that  Dr.  Carlyle  took  the  same  view. 
But  a  much  more  serious  question  arose  in  regard 
to  the  Memoir  that  was  attached  to  the  Letters  and 
Memorials,  entitled  "Jane  Welsh  Carlyle."  This 
was  written  by  Carlyle,  not  as  an  expiation,  as  Froude 


94        THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

represents,  but  as  a  relief  to  his  feelings  in  his  most 
dejected  moments,  after  his  wife's  death,  and  it  was 
assuredly  his  most  earnest  wish  that  it  should  never 
see  the  light  in  any  public  sense,  or  go  beyond  a 
small  circle  of  private  friends.  Could  there  be  a 
prohibition  against  publication  more  solemn  or 
binding  than  this,  which  in  Carlyle's  handwriting 
was  attached  to  the  Memoir  ? — 

"  I  still  mainly  mean  to  bum  this  Book  before 
my  own  departure  ;  but  feel  that  I  shall  always  have 
a  kind  of  grudge  to  do  it,  and  an  indolent  excuse, 
'Not  yet;  wait,  any  day  that  can  be  done!' — and 
that  it  is  possible  the  thing  may  be  left  behind  me, 
legible  to  interested  survivors, — -friends  only,  I  will 
hope,  and  with  worthy  curiosity  not  «  #worthy ! 

"In  which  event,  I  solemnly  forbid  them  each 
and  all,  to  publish  this  Bit  of  Writing  as  it  stands 
here ;  and  warn  them  that  without  fit  editing  no 
part  of  it  should  be  printed  (nor  so  far  as  I  can 
order,  shall  ever  be) ;  and  that  the  'fit  editing '  of 
perhaps  nine-tenths  of  it  will,  after  I  am  gone,  have 
become  impossible." 

Notwithstanding  this  stringent  and  impressive 
embargo,  Froude  published  the  Memoir  within  a 
month  of  Carlyle's  death,  torn  from  the  Letters 
and  Memorials  to  which  Carlyle  had  attached  it, 
and  included  in  the  "  Reminiscences,"  made  up  of 
papers  on  Carlyle's  father,  Edward  Irving,  Lord 
Jeffrey,  Southey  and  Wordsworth.  The  prohibi- 
tion against  publication,  which  formed  part  of  the 
Memoir,  was  suppressed,  and  would  never  have  been 
heard  of,  had  not  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  discovered 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE         95 

it  and  sent  it  to  the  Times.  Froude  then  explained 
that  the  written  prohibition,  indited  at  a  time  when 
Carlyle  was  fully  conscious  of  the  character  of  his 
work,  was  subsequently  cancelled  by  oral  commu- 
nications, when  or  where  he  did  not  say.  This 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  firmly  denied.  During  the 
thirteen  years  she  was  her  uncle's  constant  com- 
panion and  amanuensis,  she  knew  of  the  existence 
of  this  fragment,  and  often  heard  him  speak  of  it, 
always  in  the  sense  that  it  should  never  be  pub- 
lished, and  she  was  astounded  when  she  heard  from 
Mr.  Allingham  that  it  was  actually  in  print.  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle's  letter  which  appeared  in  the 
Times  of  May  5th,  1881,  which  Froude  called  "a 
passionate  and  angry  challenge,"  was  studiously 
moderate  in  tone,  and  was  written  because  she 
thought  it  only  right  that  people  should  know  that 
her  uncle  had,  when  his  mind  was  clear  on  the 
subject,  forbidden  the  publication  of  the  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle  Memoir,  which  was  the  part  of  the  "  Remi- 
niscences" which  gave  most  offence.  Froude's 
defence  was  "  My  conviction  is  that  he  wished  it 
to  be  published,  though  he  would  not  himself  order 
it."  In  another  place  on  this  very  point,  Froude 
says,  "  He  [Carlyle]  never  gave  me  any  order," 
so  the  responsibility  was  his.  Froude  took  the 
plunge  from  which,  he  says,  Carlyle  shrank,  but 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  had  absolutely 
declined.  Even  while  asserting  that  the  injunction 
against  publication  had  been  withdrawn,  Froude 
never  ventured  to  say  that  Carlyle  had  sanctioned 
the    removal    of    the    Memoir   from    the    Letters 


96         THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

and  Memorials  and  its  inclusion  in  the  "  Remini- 
scences," and  the  reason  given  for  this  transference 
is  remarkable.  Froude  removed  the  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle  Memoir  from  the  Letters  and  Memorials, 
and  published  it  with  the  "  Reminiscences " 
"because,"  he  coolly  tells  us,  "when  the  Letters 
appeared,  the  blame  of  much  might  be  thrown  on 
her."  His  object,  therefore,  was  that  people  might 
blame  Carlyle  for  what  ought  really  to  be  laid  to 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  charge.  The  proceeding  was  in  every 
way  an  unjust  one,  for  the  Letters,  or  a  fair  selection 
of  them,  published  along  with  the  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle  Memoir,  would  have  relieved  its  gloom  and 
prevented  many  wrong  impressions,  difficult  to 
smooth  away  when  once  stamped  in. 

Even  had  there  been  no  prohibition  on  the 
publication  of  the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir,  its 
publication  and  those  of  the  other  papers  with 
which  it  was  bound  up,  without  fit  editing,  was  a 
colossal  mistake.  The  papers  are  beautiful,  but 
scattered  through  them  are  acrid  and  stinging 
things  that  Carlyle  had,  in  his  dyspeptic  moods  and 
incongruous  way,  said  about  his  most  eminent 
contemporaries  and  private  friends.  There  is  not 
one  of  us  who  would  like  to  see  his  or  her  private 
diaries  and  familiar  epistles  given  to  the  world 
without  fit  editing.  Froude  took  seriously,  what 
were  in  Carlyle  often  mere  manifestations  of 
biliousness  or  only  fantastic  tropes.  And  even  if 
he  had  Carlyle's  directions — which  he  assuredly  had 
not — to  publish  his  undress  and  unpremeditated 
asperities,  he  erred  in  doing  so,  for  no  man  is  entitled 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE         97 

to  depute  to  another  the  doing  of  that  which  is  in 
itself  wronsf  and  ruthless.  Over-statement  was 
habitual  with  Carlyle,  and  his  hard  words  not 
seldom  concealed  the  tenderest  sentiments.  Mrs. 
Gilchrist  relates  that  once,  when  he  had  just  been 
advocating  the  shooting  of  Irishmen  who  would  not 
work,  he  was  affected  until  the  tears  ran  down  his 
face,  when  Mrs.  Carlyle  read  aloud  the  account 
of  the  execution  of  the  Italian  Burnelli ;  and  that 
on  another  occasion  he  was  caught  lavishing 
endearments  on  the  little  dog  Nero,  the  uselessness 
of  whose  existence  he  had  been,  a  few  minutes 
before,  denouncing  in  unmeasured  terms.  He  was 
sometimes  a  rough-rinded  but  always  a  soft-hearted 
man. 

The  "  Reminiscences"  was,  Froude  himself  tells 
us,  "  received  with  a  violence  of  censure  for  which 
he  was  wholly  unprepared,"  but  which  was  not  to 
be  wondered  at.  They  presented  an  altogether 
unexpected  and  intensely  painful  outline  of  Carlyle  ; 
they  wounded  the  feelings  of  many  living  persons, 
and  they  bore  obvious  traces  of  haste  and  careless- 
ness on  the  part  of  the  editor.  They  were  printed 
in  so  slovenly  a  manner  as  to  obscure  the  sense. 
The  punctuation,  the  use  of  capitals,  parentheses, 
italics,  characteristic  of  Carlyle's  style,  were  entirely 
disregarded.  Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  found 
that,  in  the  first  five  pages  of  the  printed  text,  there 
were  more  than  a  hundred  and  thirty  corrections  to 
be  made  of  words,  punctuation,  capitals,  quotation 
marks  and  such  like,  and  these  pages  were  not 
exceptional,  and  were  printed  from  MS.  written  in 

H 


98        THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

1832,  when  Carlyle's  hand-writing  was  at  its  best. 
For  this  blundering,  Froude  has  excused  himself  in 
"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  by  saying  that 
Carlyle's  manuscripts  were  harder  to  decipher  than 
the  worst  manuscripts  he  had  ever  examined,  and 
that  he  was  often  at  a  loss  to  know  what  particular 
words  might  be.  But  he  had  himself  described 
Carlyle's  manuscripts  as  "  beautiful,"  and  they  are 
still  in  existence,  and  can  be  submitted  to  competent 
judges,  who  will  assuredly  pronounce  them  deserving 
of  that  description.  They  are  clear,  distinct  and 
easily  read,  and  in  connection  with  Froude's  excuse, 
it  is  instructive  to  note  that  it  is,  in  the  printed 
text  of  Carlyle's  latest  writing,  when  his  hand  was 
shaky,  which,  Froude  says,  he  had  to  work  at  with 
a  magnifying-glass,  that  the  fewest  mistakes  occur. 
But,  as  will  be  seen  presently,  the  liberties  that 
Froude  took  with  Carlyle's  manuscripts  were  not 
confined  to  literal  or  verbal  inaccuracies,  but 
included  material  alterations  affecting  meaning. 

It  was  not  only  in  connection  with  the  inclu- 
sion of  the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir  in  the 
"  Reminiscences,"  and  the  flagrant  errors  that 
deface  that  work,  that  serious  difficulties  arose. 
The  disposal  of  the  profits  of  it  gave  rise  to 
complications,  which  first  came  to  the  surface  when 
arrangements  for  an  American  edition  had  to  be 
made.  Froude's  version  of  these  complications 
has  been  cut  out  of  the  text  of  "  My  Relations 
with  Carlyle,"  by  the  editors  and  relegated  to  the 
appendix,  so  that  it  may  not  interfere  with  the 
continuity   of  the    narrative ;   but,    as    it    raises   a 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE         99 

question  vitally  affecting  Froude's  good  faith 
and  is  really  the  introduction  to  an  essential 
part  of  the  case  against  him  in  relation  to  the 
Carlyle  manuscripts,  we  think  it  better  to  discuss 
it  here. 

"  A  singular  fatality,"  Froude  observes,  when 
approaching  the  American  negotiations,  "  has 
attended  me  from  first  to  last  in  this  busi- 
ness." That  is  quite  true,  but  the  fatality  was 
in  his  own  mind  and  methods,  and  that  it  was  so 
is  clearly  established  by  the  fact  that  we  find  an 
American  publisher,  with  whom  he  had  dealings, 
bringing  exactly  the  same  accusations  against  him 
which  have  been  made  by  all  those  who  have 
closely  scrutinized  his  conduct  and  work  in  literary 
affairs  in  this  country.    Messrs.  Harper  and  Brothers 

of  New  York   (the    Mr.  of   Froude's    Essay, 

but  we  see  no  reason  why  their  name  should  be 
concealed)  have  accused  him  of  having,  by  giving 
Carlyle's  "Reminiscences"  to  his  own  American  pub- 
lishers, disregarded  the  usage  which,  in  the  absence 
of  international  copyright,  has  been  found  to  be  the 
fairest  practicable  arrangement,  and  is  observed  by 
all  the  leading  publishers  in  America,  under  which 
is  conceded  to  the  house  which  has  issued  the  work 
of  an  English  author,  the  option  of  republishing 
upon  mutually  satisfactory  terms  the  subsequent 
works  of  the  same  author.  They  accuse  him  of 
inaccuracy,  and  not  merely  of  lapses,  but  of  ter- 
giversations of  memory.  They  accuse  him  of 
repudiating  a  formal  engagement  and  of  having 
said   what    was    to    his    knowledge    incorrrect    in 

H  2 


ioo      THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

informing  Messrs.  Scribner  that  they  were  the 
recognised  publishers  of  only  one  small  work  of 
Carlyle's,  whereas  they  were  his  publishers  for  the 
"Early  Kings  of  Norway"  and  "Frederick,"  and 
purchased  several  of  his  other  works  from  G.  P. 
Putnam. 

It  is  not  necessary  for  us  to  enter  on  the  dispute 
of  the  publishers,  but  in  the  course  of  it  there  came 
out  a  bit  of  evidence  which  effectually  disposes  of 
Froude's  contention,  which,  in  view  of  his  own 
admission  to  the  contrary,  it  is  truly  astonishing  to 
find  repeated  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle,"  that 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  had  no  claim  to  the  profits 
of  the  "  Reminiscences "  and  that  his  offer  to  let 
her  have  any  part  of  them  was  "a  spontaneous 
resolution "  of  his  own,  and  a  piece  of  gratuitous 
generosity.  Mr.  Moncure  Conway  (the  Mr.  X.  of 
Froude's  essay,  but  why  should  his  name  be  con- 
cealed ?),  was  in  1879  representing  Messrs.  Harper 
and  Brothers  in  England,  and,  hearing  that  the 
"  Reminiscences "  were  in  contemplation,  he  ap- 
proached Carlyle  on  the  subject,  suggesting  that 
the  book  should  appear  during  his  lifetime.  On 
the  4th  November,  1879,  Mr.  Moncure  Conway 
wrote  to  Messrs.  Harper  and  Brothers  as  follows  : — 
"  The  old  man  was  evidently  gratified  by  your 
thoughtfulness  in  considering  whether  he  might  not 
like  to  have  some  of  the  money  while  yet  alive. 
However,  he  does  not  desire  any  money  .  .  .  and 
he  desires  that  all  the  money  which  his  auto- 
biographical work  shall  bring  shall  be  paid  to  his 
niece,  Mary  Aitken  Carlyle,  who  has  lived  with  him 


.  '     ■ 

THE    NEMESIS    OF    FRQGJD-E      !r4>l 

since  his  wife's  death  and  is  now  nursing  him, 
night  and  day.  This  book  is  to  be  added  to  her 
share  as  she  well  deserves." 

Now  here  we  have  the  testimony  of  an  inde- 
pendent and  disinterested  witness  writing  in  1879, 
and  after  direct  communication  with  Carlyle,  that, 
as  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  consistently  main- 
tained, Carlyle  had  decided  that  the  profits  of  the 
"  Reminiscences  "  should  go  to  her  as  part  of  the 
provision  he  intended  to  make  for  her.  And  that 
was  an  equitable  arrangement,  for  the  "  Remini- 
scences," as  Carlyle  understood  them,  consisted 
entirely  of  his  own  literary  work  which  he  had  given 
to  his  niece.  He  had  no  foreshadowing  that  his 
instructions  would  be  set  at  naught,  and  that  the  Jane 
Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir,  which  none  but  loving  eyes 
should  see,  would  be  incorporated  in  the  book  for 
public  gaze  in  both  hemispheres.  These  essays  were 
amongst  the  manuscripts  which  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  had  too  liberally  lent  to  Froude  for  his  Life 
of  her  uncle,  but  they  had  a  biographic  rather  than 
an  autobiographic  value,  and  when  they  were 
separated  from  the  other  material  for  publication  as 
a  separate  work,  they  were  placed  outside  Froude's 
commission.  Froude  ultimately  established  a 
personal  interest  in  the  work  by  adding  to  it  the 
Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir,  which  formed  part  of 
the  manuscripts  given  and  bequeathed  to  him  by 
Carlyle,  but  during  Carlyle's  life  he  never  ventured 
to  moot  such  a  proceeding.  Froude  wrote  to 
Carlyle  on  the  29th  September,  1879,  enumerating 
the  names   of  the  articles   that  were   to  form   the 


!0'2      THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

"  Reminiscences,"  and  the  Memoir  is  not  amongst 
them ! 

While  Carlyle  lived  Froude  made  no  claim  to 
the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences."  He  told 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  that  she  had  a  better  right 
to  the  money  than  he,  as  the  book  was  her  uncle's 
writing  and  not  his.  His  exact  words,  one  month 
before  Carlyle's  death  were,  "  The  book  was  written 
by  your  uncle,  not  by  me,  and  there  would  be  no 
propriety  in  my  receiving  the  money  for  it."  He 
regarded  himself  merely  as  a  trustee  of  the  copy- 
right for  her,  and  when  she  was  dining  with  him 
on  the  20th  of  November,  1879,  her  husband,  Mr. 
Alexander  Carlyle,  Mr.  Ashley  Froude  and  Miss 
Margaret  Froude  being  present,  he  confirmed  this 
in  the  most  explicit  manner,  promising  to  hold  the 
whole  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences "  for  her. 
Carlyle  died  in  the  belief  that  these  profits  were 
part  of  the  provision  he  had  made  for  his  niece.  It 
was,  therefore,  with  astonishment  that  on  the 
14th  of  February,  1881  (Carlyle  being  then  dead, 
and  the  "  Reminiscences "  not  yet  published),  she 
heard  from  Froude  that  Longman  had  paid  him 
^"650  for  the  first  edition,  out  of  which  he  proposed 
to  pay  her  ,£300  as  half  of  his  receipts — "the  odd 
^"50  I  keep  for  another  purpose,"  that  other  purpose 
being,  it  turned  out,  a  subscription  in  his  own  name 
to  a  fund  then  being  raised  to  buy  5,  Cheyne  Row, 
and  present  it  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle.  To  this 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  demurred,  as  being  incon- 
sistent with  her  uncle's  intentions  and  Froude's 
engagement  with  her  ;  and  on  the  21st  of  February. 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE       103 

1 88 1,  Sir  James  Stephen  wrote  to  her  that  Froude 
was  perfectly  satisfied  with  the  note  of  a  conversa- 
tion with  her  which  Sir  James  Stephen  had  himself 
drafted.     The  note  on  this  point  ran  thus  : — 

"  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  says  that  Mr.  Froude 
some  time  ago  promised  to  give  her  the  whole 
proceeds  of  the  '  Reminiscences,'  and  that  she 
informed  her  uncle  of  his  intention,  and  that  he 
approved  it,  and  that  under  these  circumstances  she 
declines  to  receive  any  share  of  the  proceeds  less 
than  the  whole." 

On  the  same  day,  21st  February,  1881,  Froude 
wrote  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  :  "  I  had  settled 
in  my  own  mind  that  you  ought  to  have  half  of 
the  English  copyright  of  both  books,  the  '  Remini- 
scences '  and  the  '  Life  and  Letters '  to  follow.  Of 
course  you  shall  have  every  farthing  that  comes 
from  the  '  Reminiscences ','  whether  from  England, 
America,  or  the  Continent,  and  I  hope  that  it  will 
prove  as  good  a  bargain  for  you  as  the  other  would 
have  been.  ...  I  may  as  well  remind  you  that 
two-thirds  of  the  second  volume  of  the  '  Remini- 
scences '  is  from  the  '  Letters  and  Memorials,'  and 
so  mine,  if  I  wished  to  insist  on  such  a  thing,  which 
I  don't." 

Two  days  later,  on  the  23rd  of  February,  Froude 
wrote  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  as  follows :  "I  am 
bound  to  tell  you  that  Ashley  [Froude's  son],  who 
was  present,  it  seems,  at  one  of  the  conversations 
about  the  copyright,  entirely  confirms  your  account 
of  it.  I  am  utterly  ashamed  of  myself,  and  I  can 
only  suppose  that   the  addition  of  a  new  volume 


io4      THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

with  fresh  matter  [the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir] 
and  a  general  sense  that  I  had  been  thinking  a 
good  deal  about  the  American  part  of  the  business, 
had  confused  my  memory  of  what  had  passed 
and  led  me  to  believe  that  I  was  free  to  arrange 
the  details  over  again.  I  do  not  wonder  now  at 
anything  which  you  may  have  thought  of  me." 

Whether  Froude  ever  had  definitely  settled  in 
his  own  mind  that  half  the  English  copyright  of  the 
"  Reminiscences"  and  "  Life  and  Letters  "  ought  to 
be  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's,  cannot  now  be  known. 
That  bargain  would  have  been  largely  more  advan- 
tageous to  her  than  the  one  she  had  made  and 
adhered  to,  which,  although  Froude  afterwards 
repudiated  it,  he  at  this  time  acknowledged  in  the 
frankest  manner.  Even  Sir  James  Stephen,  Froude's 
fidus  Achates  and  champion,  was  constrained  to  admit 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  claim  to  the  profits  of  the  "  Remini- 
scences," for  in  the  preamble  to  an  agreement  he 
proposed,  he  wrote,  "  That  it  was  understood  between 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  and  Mr.  Froude  that  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle  should  have  the  profits  of  the 
publication  of  the  said  volume  ['  Reminiscences  '], 
and  that  such  an  undertaking  was  communicated  to 
Mr.  Carlyle  in  his  lifetime  and  approved  by  him." 
With  reference  to  the  proposal  that  all  the  profits 
of  the  "  Reminiscences,"  less  ^300  retained  by 
Froude  in  respect  of  the  addition  to  the  book  of 
the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir,  Sir  James  Stephen 
wrote,  "It  seems  to  me  that  this  arrangement 
would  be  essentially  just.  It  would  give  Mrs. 
Carlyle    what    both    her    uncle    and    Mr.    Froude 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE       105 

intended  her  to  have.  ...  It  is,  indeed,  not 
improbable  that  she  would  have  been  better  pro- 
vided for  in  the  will  if  this  expectation  on  the  part 
of  her  uncle  had  not  existed." 

Will  it  be  believed  that  after  all  this,  after  the 
acknowledgment  of  her  uncle's  intentions,  and  of  his 
solemn  understanding  on  the  subject  with  him,  of  her 
equitable  right  to  the  proceeds  of  what  was  entirely  her 
uncle's  work,  of  his  own  engagement  with  her  which 
he  felt  so  much  shame  in  having  attempted  to  depart 
from,  of  his  written  and  many  times  repeated  promise, 
Froude  actually  refused  to  pay  over  the  profits  of 
the  "  Reminiscences "  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle 
unless  she  would  admit  that  it  was  a  free  gift  from 
him  ?  Will  it  be  believed  that  he  was  supported  in 
this  by  Sir  James  Stephen  ?  Sir  James  Stephen 
wrote  to  Dr.  Benson,  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's 
solicitor,  on  the  20th  September,  1881  :  "  Mr.  Froude 
admits  that  she  has  a  moral  right  to  the  proceeds, 
less  ^300,  if  she  is  willing  to  accept  it  as  a  present 
and  to  admit  his  property  in  the  MSS.  But  if  she 
refuses  what  he  offers  on  the  terms  he  offers  it,  he 
says  she  has  no  right  to  it  at  all."  In  reply  to  a 
letter  from  Dr.  Benson  declining  any  such  admission 
on  the  part  of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  Sir  James 
Stephen  wrote,  "  I  altogether  dissent  from  the  view 
that,  if  Mrs.  Carlyle  sues  Mr.  Froude  and  fails  to 
establish  any  legal  claim  against  him,  he  will  still  be 
under  a  moral  obligation  to  give  her  the  proceeds 
of  the  '  Reminiscences  '  or  to  return  the  papers.  I 
think  that  a  promise  unaccepted  is  simply  an  offer 
which    the   promiser   is    both    legally   and    morally 


106       THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

justified    in    revoking   at    any   time    before    it    is 
accepted." 

Sir  James  Stephen  had  previously  written,  be  it 
remembered,  that  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  claim 
was  "  essentially  just." 

Froude's  position  seems  to  have  been  :  "  You 
say  that  I  am  indebted  to  you  £10  in  virtue  of  my 
engagement  with  you  and  with  your  uncle,  in  faith 
of  which  he  died.  I  admit  it,  and  here  is  the 
money ;  but  you  shall  not  have  it  unless  you  admit 
that  it  is  a  free  gift  from  me." 

Sir  James  Stephen's  was :  "  I  spontaneously  and 
unconditionally  promised  you  ^10,  but  you  said  I 
was  indebted  to  you  in  that  amount  and  failed 
to  establish  your  claim,  my  promise  is  therefore 
legally  and  morally  null  and  void." 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  received  the  profits  and 
copyright  of  the  "  Reminiscences  "  as  a  gift  from 
her  uncle  ;  she  declined  to  accept  them  or  any  part 
of  them  as  a  gift  from  Froude,  who  received  ^300 
in  respect  of  the  "Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir," 
and  every  penny  of  the  profits  from  his  "  Life 
of  Carlyle,"  notwithstanding  that  the  materials  he 
used  were  her  property  (and  the  custom  is,  we 
believe,  that  the  owner  of  the  material  receives 
half  the  profits),  and  likewise  every  penny  that 
came  from  the  "  Letters  and  Memorials,"  notwith- 
standing that  she  had  copied  with  her  own  hand  the 
Memoir  of  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  and  the  whole  of  her 
aunt's  letters  and  Carlyle's  notes  on  them,  twice 
over.  Froude's  generosity  in  handing  over  the 
profits  of  the   *'  Reminiscences,"  as  arranged   with 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE       107 

Carlyle,  while  keeping  a  firm  grip  on  all  the  rest,  is 
not  very  apparent. 

In  claiming  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences," 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  was  only  asking  for  what 
she  believed  was  justly  due  to  her,  and  her  object  in 
seeking  legal  advice  was  not,  as  Froude  suggests, 
to  enforce  the  payment  of  the  money,  but,  if 
possible,  to  prevent  him  from  misusing  the  materials 
for  the  Biography  as  by  common  consent  he  had 
misused  those  of  the  "  Reminiscences."  She 
repeatedly  offered  to  give  up  the  whole  proceeds 
of  the  first  issue  of  the  "  Reminiscences,"  which 
amounted  to  ,£1,530,  exclusive  of  the  ^300  retained 
by  Froude  in  respect  of  the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle 
Memoir,  as  well  as  the  copyright  of  the  book  and 
all  future  profits,  if  he  would  act  upon  his  public 
undertaking  contained  in  his  letter  to  the  Times 
of  May  9,  1 88 1,  and  would  at  once  restore  to 
her  the  papers  and  proceed  no  further  with  the 
Biography.  When  Froude  and  his  co-executor,  Sir 
James  Stephen,  suggested  that  the  proceeds  of  the 
"  Reminiscences,"  as  well  as  the  papers,  might 
belong  to  Mr.  Carlyle's  residuary  estate,  she  offered 
to  provide  a  substantial  and  approved  indemnity 
against  any  possible  claim  by  the  residuary  legatees. 
She  never  sought  from  Froude,  nor  did  he  ever 
offer  to  her  any  profits  beyond  those  derived  from 
the  publication  of  the  "  Reminiscences,"  less  ^300, 
which  he  retained  "in  satisfaction,"  as  Sir  James 
Stephen  put  it,  "of  any  claim  he  might  have  in 
respect  of  the  MS.  called  'Jane  Welsh  Carlyle,'  or 
in  respect  of  his  own  labour  in  preparing  the  work.' 


108       THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

Seeing  that  the  "  Reminiscences  "  was  entirely  the 
work  of  Carlyle's  pen,  and  that  the  book  was  sent 
forth  practically  unedited  and  loaded  with  errors, 
most  literary  men  will  think  that  Froude  was  not 
inadequately  paid  for  his  labour. 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  however,  found  herself 
powerless  to  prevent  the  further  desecration  of  her 
uncle's  memory.  She  was  not  at  liberty  to  with- 
draw from  Froude  the  loan  of  the  papers,  given  to 
her  by  her  uncle,  until  the  purpose  for  which  the 
loan  was  given  was  fulfilled,  and  he  was  at  liberty 
to  go  on  with  that  work,  even  after  he  had  twice 
voluntarily  offered  to  give  it  over  into  other  hands. 
When  in  1877  she  consented  to  let  Froude  have 
the  papers  she  had  implicit  faith  in  his  loyalty. 
That  was  the  time  when  Sir  James  Stephen  saw 
him  deporting  himself  as  the  affectionate  son  to  the 
venerated  father.  That  was  the  time  when  he  was 
habitually  beginning  his  letters  to  her  "  My  dear 
Mary."  That  was  the  time  when,  with  all  these 
shameful  stories  now  belched  forth,  dwelling  in  his 
mind,  he  wrote  to  her,  "  You  know  well  that  there 
is  no  man  on  earth  that  I  love  and  honour  as  I 
do  your  uncle,  and  in  that  spirit  I  hope  to  work." 
She  never  doubted  his  loyalty,  and  being  young 
and  inexperienced  in  the  ways  of  the  world,  and, 
moreover,  much  occupied  in  waiting  on  her  uncle, 
she  did  not  attempt  to  make  any  selection  from  the 
papers,  but  sent  him  a  mass  of  material,  keeping 
no  inventory,  so  that  she  never  had  any  definite 
idea  of  what  she  had  forwarded,  from  time  to  time, 
to  Onslow   Gardens.      Had  Froude  known  how  he 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE       109 

came  to  be  possessed  of  all  Carlyle's  private  letters, 
journals,  etc.,  he  would  scarcely  have  boasted  as 
he  did  in  his  letter  to  the  Times,  of  February  14th, 
1 88 1,  of  the  trust  Carlyle  had  placed  in  him.  It 
was  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  who  so  bountifully 
trusted  him,  not  Carlyle,  and  for  having  done  so 
she  bitterly  repented.  She  discovered,  when  too 
late,  that  she  had  placed  in  Froude's  hands  much 
that  her  uncle  had  never  intended  him  to  see,  and 
the  knowledge  that  she  had  thus  unwittingly  aided 
him  in  his  work  of  disparagement,  preyed  on  her 
health  and  spirits,  or,  as  she  herself  said,  broke  her 
heart.  The  complete  justification  of  her  forebodings 
and  suspicion  of  Froude's  designs  has  come  in 
11  My  Relations  with  Carlyle." 

Amongst  the  papers  which  Miss  Mary  Aitken 
too  confidingly  lent  to  Froude  were  the  love-letters 
which  passed  between  Carlyle  and  Miss  Welsh 
before  their  marriage,  and  which  would  assuredly 
never  have  been  seen  by  his  or  any  other  eye,  had 
she  noticed  what  Carlyle  had  written  respecting 
them.  "  My  strict  command  now  is,  '  Burn  them  ij 
ever  found.  Let  no  third  party  read  them  ;  let  no 
printing  of  them  or  any  part  of  thein  be  ever  thought 
of  by  those  who  love  me!  '  And  yet  in  defiance  of 
this  heart-felt  and,  we  may  say,  death-bed  conjura- 
tion, Froude  opened  the  packet,  read  all  the  letters, 
and  published  a  selection  of  them  in  the  Early 
Life.  He  never  ventured  to  assert  that  there  had 
been  any  verbal  withdrawal  of  this  most  earnest 
written  command,  and  his  conduct  in  iofnorine  it 
may  be  left  to  the  judgment  of  right-minded  men. 


no      THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

And  not  only  did  Froude  read  the  love-letters 
which  Carlyle  held  sacrosanct,  not  only  did  he 
publish  some  of  them,  but  he  so  selected  those 
which  he  published  and  so  put  a  gloss  on  them  by 
his  accompanying  comments,  that  they  convey  an 
entirely  erroneous  impression  of  the  relations  in  which 
Carlyle  and  Miss  Welsh  stood  to  each  other.  It 
fell  to  the  lot  of  Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  to 
compare  the  love-letters  published  by  Froude  with 
the  originals — a  duty,  however  uncongenial,  made 
imperative  by  Froude's  conduct — and,  although 
Professor  Norton  gives  us  but  partial  glimpses  of 
the  courtship  in  a  few  selections,  withholding  the 
rest  on  the  ground  that  they  are  too  sacred  for 
publication — he  has  done  enough  to  prove  that  the 
characters  and  relations  of  Carlyle  and  Miss  Welsh 
to  each  other  during  that  period  were  different, 
both  in  particulars  and  in  general  effect,  from  those 
depicted  by  Froude.  Professor  Norton  openly 
charged  Froude  with  having  in  the  case  of  the 
love-letters  diverged  from  the  truth,  made  assertions 
incompatible  with  the  evidence,  and  with  having 
coloured  by  his  own  imagination,  those  statements, 
having  the  form  of  truth,  which  he  preserved. 

This  was  no  irresponsible  chatter  in  a  newspaper ; 
it  was  not  a  mere  rumour.  It  was  a  well-weiohed 
charge,  by  an  eminent  man  of  letters,  and  supported 
by  convincing  documentary  evidence.  It  was  made 
in  1886.  Froude  never  replied  to  it.  He  has  no 
word  to  say  about  it  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle," 
written  the  following  year.  With  reference  to 
Professor    Norton's    charges    against    Froude    the 


THE   NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE       in 

AthencEum  (November  6th,  1886)  said:  "The 
charges  are  very  grave  indeed,  and  as  Froude  in 
his  letter  to  the  Times  makes  no  answer  to  these 
statements,  it  must  be  assumed  that  he  allows 
judgment  to  go  by  default." 

Space  will  not  permit  of  the  reproduction  of  the 
series  of  striking  instances  given  by  Professor  Norton 
of  Froude's  warping  and  varnishing  of  the  love- 
letters,  but  one  illustration,  of  his  style  of  going  to 
work  and  of  the  amount  of  trust  to  be  reposed  in 
him,  may  be  given.  "  Mr.  Froude  tells  the  story, 
which  will  be  remembered  by  all  readers  of  the 
book,  of  the  relations  between  Edward  Irving  and 
Miss  Welsh,  of  his  falling  in  love  with  her  after 
his  engagement  to  his  future  wife,  of  her  reciproca- 
tion of  his  feeling,  of  her  refusal  to  encourage  him 
because  of  the  bonds  by  which  he  was  held,  and 
of  the  conclusion  of  the  affair  by  his  marriage  to 
Miss  Martin.  It  was  an  affair  discreditable  to 
Irving,  and  for  a  time  it  brought  much  suffering 
to  Miss  Welsh.  Mr.  Froude  is  aware  that  the 
telling  of  such  a  private  experience  requires  excuse, 
and  he  justifies  it  by  the  following  plea  : — '  I  should 
not  unveil  a  story  so  sacred  in  itself,  and  in  which 
the  public  have  no  concern,  merely  to  amuse  their 
curiosity ;  but  Mrs.  Carlyle's  character  was  pro- 
foundly affected  by  this  early  disappointment,  and 
cannot  be  understood  without  a  knowledge  of  it. 
Carlyle  himself,  though  acquainted  generally  with 
the  circumstances,  never  realised  completely  the 
intensity  of  the  feeling  which  had  been  crushed.' 

"  Both  of  these  alleged  grounds  of  excuse  are 


ii2       THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

contradicted  by  the  evidence  of  the  letters  of  Miss 
Welsh  and  Carlyle.  Her  letters  show  that  her 
feelings  for  Irving,  first  controlled  by  principle  and 
honour,  soon  underwent  a  very  natural  change.  Her 
love  for  him  was  the  passion  of  an  ardent  and  inex- 
perienced girl,  twenty  or  twenty-one  years  old, 
whose  character  was  undeveloped,  and  who  had  but 
an  imperfect  understanding  of  the  capacities  and 
demands  of  her  own  nature.  In  the  years  that 
followed  upon  this  incident  she  made  rapid  pro- 
gress in  self-knowledge  and  in  the  knowledge  of 
others,  chiefly  through  Carlyle's  influence,  and  she 
came  to  a  more  just  estimate  of  Irving's  character 
than  she  had  originally  formed.  Irving's  letters  to 
her,  his  career  in  London,  his  published  writings, 
revealed  to  her  clear  discernment  his  essential 
weakness, — his  vanity,  his  mawkish  sentimentality, 
his  self-deception,  his  extravagance  verging  to  cant 
in  matters  of  religion.  The  contrast  between  his 
nature  and  Carlyle's  did  '  affect  her  profoundly,' and 
her  temporary  passion  for  Irving  was  succeeded  by 
a  far  deeper  and  healthier  love.  '  What  an  idiot  I 
was  for  ever  thinking  that  man  so  estimable,'  she 
wrote  in  May,  1824.'  "  It  will  be  recollected  that  she 
afterwards  pointedly  remarked,  that  if  she  had  married 
Irving  there  would  have  been  no  gift  of  tongues. 

The  whole  tendency  of  the  love-letters,  as  given 
by  Froude,  is  to  put  Carlyle  in  an  unpleasant  and 
intensely  selfish  light.  This  is  evinced  "  in  many 
minor  disparaging  statements,  so  made  as  to  avoid 
arousing  suspicion  of  their  having  little  or  no 
foundation,  and  arranged  so  as  to  contribute  artfully 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE       113 

to  the  general  effect  of  depreciation.  Like  the 
"  Reminiscences,"  the  love  -  letters  are  thickly 
studded  with  errors  and  with  unnoted  omissions  of 
words,  clauses,  and  sentences,  which  sometimes 
interfere  seriously  with  the  meaning. 

What  has  been  said  of  the  Froude  version  of  the 
love-letters  as  regards  their  disposition  to  make  the 
worst  of  Carlyle,  applies  to  all  the  early  letters  made 
use  of  by  Froude.  One  has  but  to  read  these 
letters  in  Froude's  "  Life  "  with  his  comments,  and 
compare  them  with  Professor  Norton's  series  of 
early  Letters  without  comment,  to  recognise  two 
different  streams  of  tendency.  The  latter  do  not 
leave  a  bad  taste  in  the  mouth.  The  impression 
they  make  is  vastly  more  agreeable.  The  sense 
of  sourness  and  cynicism  is  submerged  in  floods  of 
kindliness  and  geniality.  Even  when  Froude  is 
most  favourable  to  Carlyle,  he  does  not  succeed  in 
inducing  the  same  degree  of  sympathy  and  admira- 
tion, that  Norton's  Letters  evoke.  Froude  depicts 
Carlyle's  relations  with  his  father  and  mother  and 
brothers  and  sisters  as  creditable  to  him — he  could 
not  avoid  doing  so — but  in  Norton's  letters  these 
relations  become  generous  and  delightful.  We  dis- 
cover him  there  the  affectionate,  thoughtful,  reverent 
son,  and  considerate  monitor  and  liberal-handed 
guide  of  the  rest  of  the  family  circle.  We  see  him 
in  far  manlier,  gentler,  more  gracious  form  than 
Froude  has  suggested  to  us. 

Froude's  allegation — made  to  suggest  a  sordid 
motive — that  "  more  than  once  inquiries  had  been 
made    of  me   by   her   [Mrs.    Alexander    Carlyle's] 

1 


ii4       THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

lawyers  when  there  would  be  any  further  money 
coming  to  her  from  other  editions  ?  "  is  at  variance 
with  the  facts.  Copies  of  all  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  lawyer's  letters  have  been  preserved,  and 
in  not  one  of  them  is  there  any  inquiry  about  a 
second  edition.  The  lawyers  are  happily  alive  and 
are  ready  to  meet  Froude's  statement  with  a  flat 
denial.  It  was  Froude's  lawyers  who  first  raised 
the  question  of  a  second  edition  of  the  "  Remini- 
scences." On  the  1 2th  of  January,  1886,  they  wrote  : 
"  The  '  Reminiscences  '  of  Thomas  Carlyle  are  now 
out  of  print  and  a  new  edition  is,  or  soon  will  be, 
required  ....  He  [Mr.  Froude]  proposes  that,  as 
Mrs.  Mary  Carlyle  is  to  have  the  profit  of  the  work, 
she  should  correct  and  edit  the  new  edition,  but 
with  this  proviso  that  the  Memoir  of  Mrs.  Jane 
W.  Carlyle  is  withdrawn  from  the  book.  This 
Memoir  being  Mr.  Froude's  property  in  every  sense 
of  the  word,  he  does  not  intend  it  to  appear  again 
with  the  '  Reminiscences,'  but  will  attach  it  as  a 
preface  to  the  '  Letters  of  Mrs.  Carlyle.' 

The  nonchalance  of  this  proposal  will  be  under- 
stood when  it  is  remembered  that  ^"300  had  been 
paid  to  Mr.  Froude  for  the  use  of  this  Memoir  in 
the  "  Reminiscences "  together  with  his  editorial 
labours.  Of  course  the  proposal  was  objected  to 
and  the  objection  was  sustained.  How  interesting- 
it  is  to  note  that  Froude  had  at  length  discovered 
that  the  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle  Memoir  had  been 
dislocated  from  its  proper  attachments,  and  that  its 
right  place  was  as  a  preface  to  the  Letters  ! 

Throughout  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle  "  Froude 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE       115 

assumes  the  attitude  of  an  injured  person  and  solicits 
public  commiseration.  The  task  of  writing  Carlyle's 
Biography  was,  he  says,  thrust  on  him,  he  accepted  it 
with  reluctance,  he  several  times  resolved  to  go  no 
further  with  it,  but  disinterested  friendship  carried 
him  on  at  a  great  personal  sacrifice,  and,  while  he 
might  have  produced  a  popular  work  that  would 
have  pleased  everybody,  he  courageously  chose  to 
incur  obloquy  in  order  to  insure  to  Carlyle  that 
post-mortem  immolation  which  he  had  so  earnestly 
desired.  No  one  kept  faith  with  him.  Carlyle  ought 
to  have  informed  him  that  he  intended  the  papers 
should  be  made  use  of  by  others.  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  ought  to  have  informed  him  that  the  papers 
were  hers.  Mr.  Norton  ought  to  have  communicated 
with  him.  But  everybody  did  what  they  ought  not 
to  have  done  and  he  was  left  lamenting. 

Whether  the  work  of  becoming  Carlyle's  biographer 
was  thrust  on  Froude,  or  whether  he  diligently 
sought  it,  it  is  now  impossible  to  say.  It  was  unlike 
Carlyle  to  thrust  such  a  task  on  anyone,  and  up  till 
1877  he  abjured  any  biography  of  himself.  That 
Froude  was  reluctant  to  undertake  it,  is  not  apparent. 
He  did  twice  threaten  to  throw  it  up,  but,  when 
pressed  to  surrender  it,  he  clung  to  it  stubbornly. 
However  much  friendship  may  have  mingled  with 
it,  that  it  was  a  disinterested  undertaking  cannot  be 
maintained,  for  it  brought  Froude  very  large  profits. 
It  is  distasteful  to  have  to  allude  to  the  money 
question  ;  but  it  is  Froude  who  has  introduced  it  by 
attributing  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  the  most 
mercenary  motives,    and    indeed    even   dishonesty, 

1  2 


n6       THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

in  making  a  claim  to  money  to  which  she  was 
not  justly  entitled,  while  at  the  same  time  he  is 
dwelling  on  his  own  generosity,  A  casual  reader 
of  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle  "  might  rise  from 
the  perusal  of  it,  believing  that  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  had  greedily  grasped  at  everything  and  that 
Froude  had  worked  for  nothing.  It  is  therefore 
necessary  to  point  out  that  Froude  was  well  paid  for 
all  he  did.  We  have  reason  to  believe  that  his 
"  Life  of  Carlyle  "  was  the  most  remunerative  piece 
of  literary  work  in  which  he  ever  engaged.  He 
has  told  us  that  the  profits  of  the  first  issue  of  the 
"Reminiscences"  amounted  to  .£1,830.  Let  his 
representatives  tell  us  what  have  been  the  profits  of 
his  seven  subsequent  volumes,  and  the  public  will 
then  be  in  a  position  to  judge  whether  he  was  quite 
as  disinterested  and  badly  used  as  he  tries  to  make 
out.  The  "  Letters  and  Memorials,"  which  he  had 
merely  to  edit  for  the  press,  were  a  handsome 
legacy,  and  from  the  other  papers  he  drew  no  small 
reward,  or  what  he  himself  would  describe  as  "  an 
immense  sum." 

That  Froude,  in  order  that  Carlyle  might  enjoy 
that  posthumous  penance  which  he  extolled  as 
heroic,  but  which  common  men  must  regard  as 
idiotic,  braved  a  storm  of  public  censure,  is  mere 
moonshine.  He  has  told  us  that  he  was  "  quite 
unprepared  for  the  violence  of  censure  "  with  which 
the  "Reminiscences"  was  received.  "Those 
tender  and  suffering  passages,"  he  wrote,  "which  I 
was  universally  reproached  for  having  published, 
I  thought,  and  I    still   think,  were  precisely  those 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE       117 

which  would  win  and  command,  the  pity  and  sym- 
pathy of  mankind."  The  fact  is  that  he  made 
a  miscalculation, — a  huge  and  grievous  one, — and 
mankind  at  once  found  him  out  and  condemned  him 
accordingly.  If  Carlyle  did  hanker  after  a  moral 
cremation,  and  there  is  not  a  shred  of  evidence 
beyond  Froude's  imaginary  conversations  that  he 
ever  did  so,  it  was  a  senile  and  morbid  epiphe- 
nomenon  of  distracting  grief,  which  a  true  friend 
should  have  taken  at  its  real  value.  What  good 
could  come  to  any  mortal  man  from  perpetuating  the 
wailings  of  a  grief-tortured  soul,  from  reverberating 
them  and  founding  on  them  a  story  of  life-long 
delinquency  ?  The  only  effect  that  Froude's  action 
could  have  would  be  to  impair  and  weaken  the 
influence  of  Carlyle,  of  the  importance  of  which,  he 
declares,  he  had  such  a  high  sense,  and  which  will, 
he  prophesied,  increase  with  each  generation.  He 
has  done  his  best  to  put  a  stop  to  it.  If  all  the 
world  is  to  be  made  every  great  man's  valet,  and  if 
the  tenderest  tremors  of  his  heart-strings,  in  the 
pensive  twilight,  are  to  be  trumpeted  abroad  as  the 
quakings  of  a  guilty  soul,  we  had  better  have  no 
biographies  at  all. 

In  "My  Relations  with  Carlyle "  Froude  has 
advanced  in  rancour  far  beyond  the  "  Life,"  and 
while  attempting  to  blacken  his  subject  has  hope- 
lessly stultified  himself.  "The  only  life  of  a  man," 
he  has  written,  "  which  is  not  worse  than  useless  is 
a  '  Life '  which  tells  all  the  truth  so  far  as  the 
biographer  knows  it."  He  wrote  what  purported  to 
be  a  true    Life  of  Carlyle,   in  which   he  expressly 


n8       THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

stated  he  had  concealed  nothing,  but  all  the  time 
he  had  up  his  sleeve  a  series  of  shocking  charges 
which  he  held  ready,  on  occasion,  to  produce,  and 
which  his  son  and  daughter  have  now  tabled.  The 
charges  are  false,  but  if  they  had  been  true,  what 
good  could  their  production  do  ?  Surely  it  was 
fatuous  to  imagine  that  Froude  could  clear  his 
own  honour  if  assailed,  by  throwing  shame  on  the 
memory  of  the  dead  man  who  had  trusted  him,  whose 
loving  friend  he  professed  to  be,  whose  reputation 
he  had  already  injured,  and  from  whom  he  had 
derived  large  pecuniary  advantage  ?  The  charge 
against  Froude  was  that  he  had  misunderstood 
Carlyle,  and  had  in  his  haste,  inaccuracy  of  vision, 
and  imaginative  misconception,  depicted  him  in  a 
sombre  and  unfavourable  light,  and  made  him  appear 
quite  other  than  he  was.  His  retort  to  that  charge 
is,  "I  was  too  kind  to  him  :  he  was  hideous  and 
repulsive,  and  I  knew  it  all  the  time."  Is  there  in 
the  history  of  Biography  another  instance  of  perfidy 
like  this  ?  There  has  assuredly  been  no  literary 
outrage  approaching  it  since  the  publication  of 
Hogg's  brochure  on  "The  Domestic  Manners  and 
Private  Life  of  Sir  Walter  Scott." 

With  plaintive  air  Froude  asks  what  motive  he 
could  have  had  beyond  his  desire  to  gratify  Car- 
lyle's  remorse,  and  to  mete  out  stern  justice,  for  the 
course  which  he  took  in  his  "  Life  of  Carlyle "  ? 
We  would  rather  leave  motives  alone  and  deal 
with  actions,  but  it  is  Froude  who  twice  over  has 
challenged  an  examination  of  his  motives.  It  is 
true,   as    he    says,   that    no    one  does   wrong  with- 


THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE       119 

out  some  motive,  but  motives  are  often  beyond 
sounding  depth — and  the  most  potent  of  them  are 
sometimes  the  most  unfathomable.  It  is  possible 
that  some  of  the  motives  which  actuated  Froude 
in  his  dealings  with  Carlyle's  biographical  material 
were  sub-liminal  in  their;  operation  and  unknown 
to  himself;  but  on  the  surface,  motives,  not  wanting 
in  strength,  are  discernible.  Froude  is  not  entitled 
to  say  "  I  had  no  secret  injuries  to  resent."  It 
is  not  improbable  that  some  of  Carlyle's  too  out- 
spoken strictures  on  his  writings,  such  as  that 
they  displayed  "  a  fondness  for  indecent  exposure," 
and  his  far  from  complimentary  references  to 
him  in  the  letters  he  read,  may  have  rankled 
in  his  breast,  and  it  is  at  any  rate  certain,  from 
the  contents  of  this  pamphlet,  that  there  was  a 
sense  of  injury  as  to  the  manner  in  which  Carlyle 
had  disposed  of  his  papers.  "  If  he  had  intended," 
says  Froude,  "  that  these  papers  should  be  made  use 
of  by  others  and  in  opposition  to  the  judgment  at 
which  I  should  arrive,  should  that  judgment  not 
coincide  with  theirs,  then  he  was  not  dealing  fairly 
with  me."  "  In  his  will,"  he  says,  "  he  had  left  his 
papers  to  his  brother  John.  This,  too,  I  did  not 
know  and  I  ought  to" have  been  informed  of  it." 
"  If  it  was  so,"  he  says  again  [if  the  papers  had  been 
given  to  his  niece  Miss  Mary  Aitken,  as  they  un- 
doubtedly were],  "  I  had  again  been  treated  unfairly, 
for  I  ought  to  have  been  informed  of  it ;  but  all  was 
left  uncertain,  all  was  in  confusion."  Finally  he 
puts  it  bluntly  enough,  "  but  faith  had  not  been 
kept   with    me."     Froude   does   not  seem   to  have 


120       THE    NEMESIS   OF    FROUDE 

kept  his  sense  of  grievance  to  himself,  but  infected 
with  it  Sir  James  Stephen,  who  says  :  "  The  whole 
difficulty  in  this  matter  arose  from  the  feebleness 
and  indecision — natural  enough  in  extreme  old  age — 
which  prevented  Mr.  Carlyle  from  making  up  his  mind 
conclusively  as  to  what  he  wished  to  be  done  about 
his  papers,  and  having  his  decision  put  into  writing." 
Unquestionably  when  Froude  came  to  arrange  and 
comment  on  these  papers  the  old  reverence  which 
led  him  at  one  time  to  regard  Carlyle  as  almost 
superhuman,  so  that  he  reflected  how  every  word 
he  wrote  would  seem  in  his  eyes,  in  order  that 
affectation  might  be  avoided,  had  evaporated,  and 
there  had  come  in  its  place  a  rigorous  appraisement 
of  the  many  faults  and  failings  of  the  erstwhile  hero 
— amongst  which  had  been  some  want  of  candour 
in  his  conferences  with  James  Anthony  Froude. 
Love  and  admiration  there  still  were,  Froude  assures 
us,  but  mingled  with  these  was  grave  reprehension 
and — shall  we  say — wounded  amotir  propre  ? 

But  if  it  was  in  this  mood  that  Froude  entered 
on  his  biographical  campaign,  other  motives  deter- 
mining its  course  and  issue  soon  came  into  play. 
The  "  Reminiscences  "  appeared,  and  were  received, 
as  he  has  told  us,  with  a  violence  of  censure  for 
which  he  was  quite  unprepared,  and  from  that 
moment  it  became  an  object  with  him  to  justify 
himself.  Instead  of  bowing  to  the  universal  con- 
demnation of  his  indiscretions  and  observing 
reticence  and  discrimination  in  his  further  progress 
in  the  work,  he  bent  himself  to  make  good  his  case, 
and  influenced  no  doubt  by  the  knowledge  that  he 


THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE       121 

had  in  his  keeping,  as  a  last  resort,  those  shocking 
secrets  which  he  has  enshrined  in  the  pamphlet  now- 
given  to  the  world,  he  proceeded  with  his  theme 
of  adulatory  defamation.  His  mind  was  poisoned 
against  Carlyle  by  the  conception  he  had  formed  of 
his  treatment  of  his  wife,  and  do  what  he  might, 
amidst  all  the  nectar  and  ambrosia,  the  subtle  and 
deadly  venom  would,  from  time  to  time,  trickle  out. 
In  Froude's  somewhat  rank  imagination  conceptions 
grew  apace.  Once  formed  they  were  expanded 
from  within  and  never  subjected  to  the  pressure  of 
facts  from  without.  And  so  his  malign  conception 
of  Carlyle  gathered  strength  as  he  went  on,  and  is 
seen  in  full  force  in  his  posthumous  paper.  Let  it 
be  granted  that  he  wished  to  limn  truly  the  portrait 
in  his  mind's  eye,  yet  that  portrait  was  blotched  and 
discoloured,  and  in  putting  it  on  his  canvas  he 
emphasised  the  blemishes  and  deepened  the  shadows. 
He  aimed  at  producing  a  popular  book — what 
biographer  does  not  ?  and  he  was  not  ignorant 
that  startling  effects  and  controversial  matter  are 
attractive  in  literature.  His  "  Nemesis  of  Faith," 
which  he  himself  described  as  "  heterodoxy  flavoured 
with  sentimentalism,"  did  not  attract  much  attention 
until  Sewell  publicly  burnt  a  copy  of  it  in  the  Hall 
of  Exeter  College.  The  sale  then  went  up  with  a 
bound,  and  there  was  a  call  for  a  second  edition  within 
a  year.  And  so  the  "  Reminiscences,"  although 
universally  condemned,  was  a  decided  pecuniary 
success.  The  "Reminiscences"  was  bad  enough, 
but  the  first  two  volumes  of  the  Life  were  worse. 
This    is  a  book   that  to   all  who  knew    the   truth, 


i22       THE    NEMESIS    OF    FROUDE 

caused  pain  by  the  artful  detraction  that  lurks 
behind  its  professions  of  friendship,  admiration, 
and  even  reverence.  It  is  a  cynical  betrayal  of  a 
trust  and  serves  to  warrant  the  most  sinister  infer- 
ences concerning  Carlyle's  character  that  were 
drawn  from  the  "  Reminiscences."  No  unbiased 
person  can  read  it  carefully  without  a  conviction 
that  the  original  text — the  Letters — does  not  sup- 
port Froude's  commentary,  and  that  the  Letters 
themselves  have  been  glossed,  distorted  from  their 
plain  significance,  and  misinterpreted  with  perverse 
ingenuity.  The  process  is  discoverable  by  all  who 
look  beneath  the  surface,  and  in  it  Froude  has 
revealed  his  own  nature.  The  wrong  done  to 
Carlyle  was  a  grievous  one,  but  it  is  being  re- 
dressed ;  his  real  character  will  yet  shine  out 
through  all  Froude's  obscurations. 

"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle  "  is  a  kind  of  literary 
garbage,  and,  like  garbage,  creates  disgust,  but  like 
garbage  also  it  may  not  be  without  its  use  in 
nature,  if  it  promote  the  growth  of  a  just  estimate 
of  the  spirit  and  methods  of  its  author. 

Intellectually  fulfilling  one's  ideal  of  greatness, 
a  man  made  in  the  noblest  human  mould,  in 
originality,  in  range  of  historical  knowledge,  in 
breadth  of  literary  culture,  in  command  of  language, 
in  lustre  of  imagination,  in  grasp  of  judgment, 
unsurpassed  in  his  century,  Carlyle  will  yet  be 
recognised,  through  the  mists  and  miasms  that 
Froude  has  drawn  around  him,  and  through  the 
gloom  of  his  own  moodiness  and  melancholy,  as 
morally  as  well    as    intellectually  great.      He  was, 


THE    NEMESIS   OF   FROUDE       123 


o 


verily,  one  of  the  kindliest,  most  generous,  true- 
hearted,  humane,  and  upright  of  men,  in  whom, 
under  a  rugged  exterior,  were  great  depths  of  tender- 
ness and  comprehensive  sympathy,  who  with  intense 
earnestness  combined  quaint  pleasantry  and  genial 
humour.  When  his  shallow  and  ribald  critics  are 
forgotten,  his  memory  will  be  cherished  by  the 
world. 


APPENDIXES 


127 


APPENDIX 
I. 

THE    CARLYLE    PAPERS 

In  a  pamphlet  which  was  printed  for  private  circulation  in  1886, 
and  which  has  been  given  to  the  public  as  an  Appendix  to  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle,"  Sir  James  Stephen's  view  of  Froude's 
dealings  with  Carlyle's  papers  is  very  fully  set  forth.  Sir  James 
was  co-executor  with  Froude  under  the  codicil  to  Carlyle's  will, 
was  aware  of  everything  that  took  place  during  the  negotiations 
after  Carlyle's  death,  and  was  a  man  of  high  intellectual  endow- 
ments and  of  judicial  training,  so  that  great  weight  naturally 
attaches  to  his  opinion  on  the  case.  That  opinion  amounts  to 
a  vindication  of  Froude's  conduct,  to  which  is  added  a  warm 
eulogium  on  the  integrity  and  purity  of  his  motives.  At  first 
sight  it  seems  to  justify  all  that  Froude  did  and  to  re-establish 
his  reputation,  at  least  in  as  far  as  the  use  of  the  Carlyle  papers 
was  concerned ;  but  a  closer  examination  will,  we  believe,  con- 
vince the  open-minded  that  as  it  was  founded  on  evidence, 
much  of  which  has  been  proved  to  be  erroneous,  and  is  not 
altogether  free  from  partizan  bias,  it  does  not  possess  the  authori- 
tative character  that  Froude  ascribes  to  it,  and  cannot  be  regarded 
as  a  final  award.  It  was,  of  course,  not  a  judicial  opinion,  but 
that  of  Froude's  advocate  in  the  case. 

Sir  James  Stephen  had  somehow  formed  an  exalted  estimate 
of  Froude's  ability  and  character  and  would  not  listen  to  anything 
reflecting  on  either.  He  stood  aloof  from  what  Froude  has 
himself  described  as  the  storm  of  censure  and  indignation  with 
which  the  "  Reminiscences  "  was  received,  and  legitimately  prided 
himself  on  having  defeated  the  attempt  made  to  prevent  him  from 
writing  Carlyle's  Life.     He  entertained  towards  him  feelings  of 


128  APPENDIX 

deep  personal  attachment,  so  that  in  reply  to  a  conciliatory  letter 
from  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  asking  advice  in  the  interests  of 
peace,  he  wrote,  declining  to  help  her  as  she  had  consulted  a 
solicitor  and  said,  "  If  you  have  occasion  to  communicate  further 
with  me  on  the  subject,  please  observe  that  Mr.  Froude  is  my 
intimate  and  valued  friend." 

Sir  James  Stephen  accepted  the  version  of  his  intimate  and 
valued  friend's  relations  with  Carlyle  without  question  or  demur, 
and  the  version  presented  to  him  must  have  been  very  different 
from  that  which  is  now  given  to  us,  for  he  is  able  to  say  that  he 
had  never  heard  Froude  utter  "  one  ill-natured  word "  about 
Carlyle  or  express  anything  but  unqualified  admiration  of  him 
morally  and  intellectually.  It  was  perhaps  professions  of  unmixed 
admiration  and  unvarying  benignity  that  led  Sir  James  Stephen  to 
accept  simpliciter  Froude's  assurance  that  Carlyle  had  deputed 
him  to  make  atonement  for  him,  by  taking  out  probate,  in  solemn 
form,  of  all  his  little  faults.  It  is  clear,  however,  that  Sir  James 
Stephen  did  not  know  the  measure  of  those  faults  according  to 
Froude's  valuation  of  them.  They  were  nothing  and  amounted  to 
nothing,  Sir  James  thought,  in  the  great  balance  of  Carlyle's  quali- 
ties. He  believed  that,  as  there  was  no  life  that  would  bear  a  more 
severe  scrutiny,  there  could  be  no  harm  in  exhibiting  such  small 
flaws  as  freckled  it  and  proved  it  human.  Had  Sir  James  Stephen 
been  aware  that  the  time  would  come  when  Froude  would  hold 
Carlyle  up  to  public  obloquy  as  being  all  flaws,  with  no  sound  part 
in  him,  as  selfish,  cruel,  arrogant,  neglectful,  hypocritical,  as  a  man 
who  ought  never  to  have  married,  a  Lothario  and  a  wife-beater, 
the  testimonial  he  gave  him  would  probably  have  been  couched  in 
language  somewhat  different  from  that  in  which  it  now  appears. 
Had  he  realised  that  he  had  been  himself  deceived  by  Froude, 
that  Carlyle's  alleged  ill-treatment  of  his  wife  was  a  fiction,  and 
his  desire  for  expiation  the  figment  of  a  distorted  imagination,  and 
that  some  of  the  statements  made  to  him  about  the  papers  were 
inconsistent  with  fact,  we  may  question  whether  there  would  have 
been  any  testimonial  at  all.  Sir  James  Stephen  was  a  just  man 
and  loved  decorum,  and  that  he  would  have  disapproved  of 
Froude's  later  revelations,  if  true,  and  condemned  them  utterly 
being  false,  there  can  be  no  doubt.  Had  he  known  what  we  now 
do,  he  could  not  possibly  have  said,  as  he  did  in  his  letter  to 
Froude,  that  he  believed  his  revelations  about  Carlyle  up  to  that 


APPENDIX  129 

date  to  be  "  the  truth,  the  whole  truth,  and  nothing  but  the  truth ; " 
he  would  not  probably  have  taken  upon  himself  the  trouble 
to  prepare,  although  there  were  solicitors  engaged  on  behalf  of  the 
executors,  the  case  which  was  submitted  to  counsel  for  them, 
or  to  write  long  and  very  able  letters  to  Dr.  Benson  in  defence 
of  Froude,  which  seem  to  us,  however,  to  be  in  parts  somewhat 
casuistical. 

Sir  James  Stephen's  strong  advocacy  of  Froude's  case  in  the 
Carlyle  controversy  was  undoubtedly  due  to  his  unlimited  and 
unique  faith  in  him.  Whatever  Froude  said  must  be  true.  He  could 
not  entertain  the  claim  to  her  uncle's  papers  of  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle,  a  woman  of  unimpeachable  veracity — her  uncle  so  styled 
her  in  his  will — because  it  depended  on  an  oral  communication, 
but  he  saw  no  difficulty  in  adopting  the  statements  of  Froude — 
a  man  whose  inaccuracy  was  even  then  a  bye-word — although 
these  were  founded  entirely  on  oral  communications.  Froude's 
commission  to  write  Carlyle's  life  rested  on  an  oral  com- 
munication; he  had  no  writing  to  show  for  it.  The  alleged 
gift  of  the  papers  to  him  was  by  oral  communication.  The 
alleged  permission  to  publish  the  "  Memoir  of  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle,"  notwithstanding  the  prohibition  on  publication  attached 
to  it,  was  by  oral  communication.  The  alleged  permission  to 
burn  the  papers  was  by  oral  communication.  The  supposed 
out-pourings  of  remorse  and  instructions  for  the  post- 
humous penitential  parade  were  by  oral  communications. 
Froude  must  have  felt  that  he  was  making  rather  too  heavy 
demands  on  trust  in  his  own  memory,  for  he  says  in  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle,"  "  I  see  now — I  saw  it  before,  but  I  was 
unwilling  to  worry  him — that  I  ought  to  have  insisted  on  receiving 
from  him  in  writing  his  own  distinct  directions." 

Most  of  the  points  raised  in  Sir  James  Stephen's  letter  with 
regard  to  the  Carlyle  papers  have  been  answered  in  our  reply  to 
Froude's  "  Apologia "  in  which  they  are  also  raised.  The  most 
material  point  was  the  ownership  of  these  papers,  and  as  to  this, 
evidence  has  been  adduced  which  we  believe  proves  that  they 
became  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  property  in  1875  by  gift  from 
her  uncle.  It  is  desirable,  however,  to  make  some  observations  on 
the  memorandum  which  Sir  James  Stephen  quotes  at  length  and 
which  he  thinks  disposes  of  that  claim — a  claim  which,  evidently 
in  ignorance   of  Froude's  letters   to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle   of 

K 


i3o  APPENDIX 

8th  and  ioth  February,  1880,  and  to  the  Times  of  2  5th. February, 
1 881,  Sir  James  Stephen  says  neither  Froude  nor  he  had  any 
notice  of  until  they  were  informed  of  it  by  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  solicitors  in  June,  1881,  and  which  he  somewhat  dis- 
courteously, not  to  say  questionably,  insinuated  was  not  present 
to  her  mind  at  the  time  the  memorandum  was  written,  but  only 
occurred  to  her  or  was  invented  after  she  had  talked  over  the 
matter  with  her  friends. 

The  following  is  the  memorandum  in  full,  as  copied  by  Sir  J. 
Stephen,  and  sent  to  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle,  with  the  covering  letter  :— 

"32,  De  Vere  Gardens,  S.W., 

"z\st  February ,  1 88 1. 

"  My  Dear  Mrs.  Carlyle, 

"  This  is  the  copy  of  the  memorandum  I  made  this 
afternoon ;  I  have  shown  it  to  Froude,  and  he  will  write  to  you  on 
the  subject  himself.     He  is  perfectly  satisfied. 

"  Yours  sincerely, 

"  J.  F.  Stephen." 

Memorandum  of  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle's  understanding  of  the 

FACTS    RELATING   TO    Mr.    CARLYLE'S   PAPERS. 

i.  Papers  relating  to  the  late  Mrs.  Carlyle  bequeathed 
to  Mr.  Froude  by  the  will  of  Mr.  Carlyle.  These  papers 
Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  considers  to  be  Mr.  Froude's  absolutely. 

2.  The  papers  relating  to  Mr.  Carlyle's  father,  Mr. 
Irving,  and  Lord  Jeffrey,  intended  to  be  published  under  the 
title  of  "  Reminiscences,"  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  also  understands 
to  have  been  given  to  Mr.  Froude  after  the  death  of  Mr. 
Forster,  though  she  does  not  know  what  may  have  passed 
between  Mr.  Carlyle  and  Mr.  Froude  on  the  subject.  She, 
however,  says  that  Mr.  Froude  some  time  ago  promised  to 
give  her  the  whole  of  the  proceeds  of  the  "  Reminiscences  " 
when  published,  and  that  she  informed  her  uncle  of  this 
intention,  and  that  he  approved  of  it,  and  under  these 
circumstances  she  declines  to  receive  any  share  of  the 
proceeds  less  than  the  whole. 

3.  The  papers  relating  to  Mr.  Carlyle  and  intended  to 
serve  as  materials  for  his  biography.  These  papers  Mrs.  A. 
Carlyle  understands  to  have  been  given  to  Mr.  Froude  so 


APPENDIX  131 

that  the  property  in  them  passed  to  him.  She  also  under- 
stands that  Mr.  Carlyle  intended  that  any  profit  to  be  derived 
from  the  book,  for  which  they  were  to  be  materials,  was  to 
go  to  Mr.  Froude,  and  she  has  no  wish  to  interfere  in  any 
way  with  Mr.  Froude's  discretion  as  to  the  use  to  be  made  of 
these  papers.  On  the  other  hand,  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  considers 
that  Mr.  Froude  ought  not  to  burn  or  otherwise  destroy  any 
of  these  papers,  but  to  return  them  to  her  (Mrs.  A.  Carlyle) 
after  the  biography  for  which  they  are  to  be  used  as  materials 
is  published. 

J.  F.  Stephen. 
February  21,  1881. 

We  have  here  given  the  memorandum  exactly  as  copied  by 
Sir  James  Stephen  and  sent  by  him  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle, 
and  it  is  well  worth  noting  that  the  memorandum  as  printed  in 
"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle "  differs  from  that  copy  in  three 
particulars.  In  the  first  line  of  the  first  paragraph  Mr.  has 
been  substituted  for  Mrs.  Carlyle.  In  the  fifth  line  of  the 
third  paragraph  "  her  uncle  "  has  been  substituted  for  Mr.  Carlyle, 
and  in  the  sixth  line  of  the  same  paragraph  are  has  been 
substituted  for  were.  The  substitution  of  Mr.  for  Mrs.  Carlyle 
and  of  are  for  were  alter  the  meaning  of  the  memorandum  in  a 
manner  adverse  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  claim  and  are  there- 
fore not  without  significance. 

But  further,  the  note  appended  to  the  memorandum  in  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle  "  is  very  different  from  the  note  actually 
sent  with  it  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  and  which  in  Sir  James 
Stephen's  handwriting  is  now  before  us. 

Note  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle." 

This  was  written  in  the  presence  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Carlyle  and 
Mr.  Ouvry  and  was  accepted  by  Mrs.  Carlyle  as  a  full  statement 
of  her  views.     I  sent  her  a  copy  of  it  this  day,  February  22,  188 1 
—J.  F.  S. 

Note  actually  received  by  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle. 

I  made  this  memorandum  this  day  in  the  presence  of  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  and  Mr.  Ouvry,  and  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  said  that 
it  correctly  expressed  her  views.  I  have  also  read  it  to  Mr. 
Froude. — J.  F.  Stephen. 

K    2 


i32  APPENDIX 

In  view  of  subsequent  events  it  is  interesting  to  note  that, 
according  to  Sir  James  Stephen,  Froude  was  "  perfectly  satisfied  " 
with  the  memorandum  as  sent  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle. 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  however,  was  never  perfectly  satisfied 
with  it.  It  "  correctly  expressed  her  views "  in  so  far  as  the 
effect  of  it  was,  as  she  supposed,  to  give  Froude  "absolutely" 
only  the  manuscript  "  Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle,"  to  which  his  right  was  never  in  dispute,  and  to  give 
him  also  the  possession  and  use  of  the  materials  for  the 
"  Reminiscences  "  and  Biography,  until  these  works  were  published, 
on  the  understanding  that  all  the  manuscripts  and  papers  with 
which  he  had  been  entrusted,  except  the  manuscript  "  Letters 
and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle,"  should  then  be  returned 
to  her  intact  and  none  destroyed  meantime ;  and,  lastly,  to  give 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  the  whole  proceeds  of  the  "  Reminiscences  " 
and  Froude  the  whole  proceeds  of  the  Biography. 

To  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  the  phrase  "  given  to  Mr.  Froude," 
twice  used  by  Sir  James  Stephen,  conveyed  the  same  meaning 
that  "  delivered  to  Mr.  Froude,"  or  "  placed  in  Mr.  Froude's 
hands"  would  have  done,  and  so  was  equally  consistent  with  a 
gift  or  loan ;  but  in  the  third  paragraph  of  the  memorandum,  which 
deals  with  the  materials  for  the  Biography,  Sir  James  Stephen 
distinguished  these  from  the  materials  for  the  "  Reminiscences " 
by  adding,  "  so  that  the  property  in  them  passed  to  him  "  [Froude]. 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  did  not  fully  understand  this  piece  of  legal 
phraseology,  which  was  not  explained  to  her ;  but  supposed  it  to 
mean  that  in  the  case  of  the  materials  for  the  Biography,  unlike 
those  for  the  "  Reminiscences,"  Froude  was  to  have  the  profits  of 
their  publication.  As  this  was  in  accordance  with  the  tenor  of 
the  memorandum,  she  did  not  at  the  time,  nor  afterwards,  until 
the  phrase  in  question  was  most  unfairly  used  against  her  as 
evidence  that  her  claim  to  the  papers  was  an  afterthought,  attribute 
any  importance  to  it,  believing  that  the  papers  were  to  be  restored 
to  her  as  soon  as  the  Biography  was  finished.  Why  should  she 
split  hairs  about  a  phrase,  which  so  distinguished  a  man  as  Sir 
James  Stephen,  of  whom  she  had  no  suspicion,  employed  as  the 
right  one?  When  Sir  James  Stephen  wrote,  as  he  did  at  first, 
"  given  by  Mr.  Carlyle,"  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  said  "  No,  not 
by  Mr.  Carlyle,  but  by  me  ;  they  were  given  by  me."  Thereupon 
Sir  James  Stephen,  at  her  instance,  struck  out  the  words  "by 


APPENDIX  133 

Mr.  Carlyle,"  but  added  the  words  "  so  that  the  property  passed 
to  him."  To  this  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  said  nothing,  because 
she  agreed  that  Froude  was  to  have  the  profits  of  the  Biography, 
and  only  stipulated  that  the  materials  were  to  be  returned  to  her 
when  the  work  was  accomplished. 

Possession,  for  the  time  being,  of  the  papers,  with  the  right 
to  use  them  and  also  to  take  the  profits  of  publication,  which,  in 
the  case  of  the  Biography,  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  always  con- 
ceded to  Froude,  would  naturally  seem  to  her  very  much  the 
same  thing  as  the  right  of  property  for  the  time  being,  and  it 
was  but  to  be  temporary  whilst  the  Biography  was  in  progress. 
Indeed,  as  every  jurist  knows,  property,  according  to  the  old 
Roman  definition  of  it,  is  jus  titendi,  fruendi,  abatendi,  and  given, 
as  in  this  case,  the  right  of  use  and  the  right  to  take  the  fruits, 
only  the  right  to  destroy  or  part  with  remains,  and  this  was 
expressly  denied  to  Froude. 

The  phrase,  therefore,  after  all,  although  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  was  dissatisfied  with  it  and  complained  of  it  when  she 
discovered  the  use  to  which  it  was  put,  is  not,  at  all  events  to  the 
lay  mind,  very  inappropriate  to  the  transaction,  which  the  memo- 
randum sought  to  define  and  interpret,  and,  in  view  of  the  abun- 
dant evidence  now  forthcoming  that  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's 
claim  to  the  papers  was  not  an  afterthought,  but  a  claim  acknow- 
ledged and  enforced  by  Carlyle  himself  in  his  lifetime,  and  then 
and  afterwards  admitted  by  Froude  in  public  and  private,  orally 
and  in  writing,  it  may  seem  superfluous  to  dwell  further  on  the 
circumstances  under  which  the  memorandum  was  written.  Never- 
theless, as  the  memorandum  was  Sir  James  Stephen's  sheet-anchor 
in  his  subsequent  dealings  with  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  and  her 
solicitors,  and  a  principal  foundation  of  his  estimate  of  FrouJe's 
rectitude  and  generosity,  and,  as  prominence  is  given  to  it  in  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle,"  it  may  be  well  to  point  out  that  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle's  responsibility  for  its  terms  is  limited  by  the 
following  considerations  : — 

1.  Carlyle  died  on  the  5th  February,  1881,  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle  having  been  his  constant  companion  from  1868,  and 
having  nursed  him  during  his  infirmity  and  in  his  last  illness. 
He  was  buried  at  Ecclefechan  on  10th  February. 

2.  The  memorandum,  dated  21st  February,  1881,  was  written 
at  a  formal  meeting  for  the  reading  of  the  will,  and  was  therefore 


i34  APPENDIX 

prepared  at  a  time  when  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  was  overcome 
by  grief  and  fatigue,  and  was  not  in  a  condition  to  transact 
important  business. 

3.  It  is  in  the  handwriting  of  Sir  James  Stephen,  and  the 
phraseology  is  his,  and  it  was  written  by  Sir  James  Stephen  at  a 
time  when,  as  he  says  himself,  he  "  was  very  superficially 
acquainted  with  these  matters,"  and  was  his  summary  in  his 
own  language  of  what  he  calls  "  a  diffuse  statement "  by  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle  "  as  to  the  details." 

4.  It  is  not  signed  by  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle. 

5.  Although  it  deals  with  matters  of  the  utmost  importance, 
involving,  besides  even  more  serious  issues,  pecuniary  interests  to 
the  amount  of  thousands  of  pounds,  about  which  differences  had 
already  arisen,  the  memorandum  was  written  on  the  spur  of  the 
moment,  no  draft  of  it  was  submitted  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle, 
and  no  opportunity  was  given  to  her  of  taking  independent  advice 
or  even  of  reflection,  before  her  verbal  assent  was  asked  to  its 
terms. 

6.  At  this  time  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  reposed  entire  con- 
fidence in  Sir  James  Stephen,  and  nothing  had  happened  to 
suggest  to  her  his  partiality  for  Froude  which  afterwards  became 
manifest.  It  was  not  until  after  the  9th  May,  1881,  when  he 
counselled  Froude  to  repudiate  his  public  offer  of  that  date  to 
restore  the  materials  for  the  Biography  without  writing  it,  and  the 
14th  May,  when  he  wrote  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  requesting 
her  to  remember  that  Froude  was  his  "  intimate  and  valued 
friend,"  that  she  realised  that  he  was  prejudiced  against  her. 

It  need  scarcely  be  said  that  a  memorandum  drafted  under  these 
circumstances,  and  merely  read  over  to  a  lady,  who  was  no  lawyer 
and  was  not  asked  to  sign  it,  ought  not  to  be  pressed  against  her, 
on  technical  grounds  of  construction,  beyond  her  own  statement 
of  what  she  understood  by  it  when  she  accepted  it,  in  conversation, 
as  correctly  expressing  her  views. 

The  following  statement  was  made  in  May,  1881,  in  support 
of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  claim  to  the  ownership  of  her  uncle's 
papers. 


APPENDIX  135 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle. 

I  am  the  niece  of  the  late  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle,  with  whom  I 
resided  at  Cheyne  Row  from  1868  until  his  death,  except  for  six 
months  in  the  year  1873.  When  I  went  to  reside  with  my  uncle 
I  had  just  left  school,  and  as  I  grew  older  I  became  his  constant 
companion  and  amanuensis.  From  1875,  when  a  change  of 
housekeeper  took  place,  I  had  the  superintendence  of  my  uncle's 
house  and  the  custody  of  most  of  its  contents,  but  not  the  super- 
intendence of  his  private  affairs.  As  to  his  private  affairs,  my 
uncle  was  assisted  by  his  brother,  Dr.  John  Carlyle,  who  used  to 
balance  his  private  accounts,  and  by  Mr.  Forster,  who  used  to 
settle  his  publisher's  accounts.  After  Mr.  Forster's  death  in  1876- 
Mr.  Ouvry  settled  the  publisher's  accounts  for  1878,  and  I  did  so 
afterwards.     My  uncle  always  drew  his  own  cheques. 

As  to  the  contents  of  the  house,  I  divide  them  into  four  classes,, 
which,  for  the  reasons  presently  mentioned,  I  treated  differently. 

First,  there  were  my  uncle's  private  business  papers, 
such  as  his  accounts  with  printers  and  publishers ;  accounts 
connected  with  his  Scotch  estate  of  Craigenputtock ;  his 
cheque  books ;  his  banker's  pass  book ;  the  lease  of  the 
house ;  Dr.  John  Carlyle's  will,  made  about  1853  ;  old  cheque 
books ;  old  bargains  with  publishers ;  and  receipted  accounts. 
There  were  also  my  uncle's  own  will,  his  purse,  and  photo- 
graphs of  his  wife  and  mother.  I  never  had  the  custody  or 
charge  of  any  of  these  documents  and  personal  effects.  They 
were  kept  by  my  uncle,  some  in  a  large  secretaire  with 
pigeon-holes  which  stood  in  the  dining-room,  and  some  in 
a  writing-desk  and  chest  of  drawers  combined  which  stood 
in  his  bedroom.  When  my  uncle  gave  me  the  keys  of  the 
house  he  retained  the  keys  of  these  repositories.  With  this 
class  should  also  come  my  uncle's  wardrobe. 

Secondly,  there  were  the  usual  contents  of  a  house- 
keeper's storeroom,  of  which  I  had  the  management  and 
superintendence,  and  in  respect  of  which  the  housekeeper 
was  responsible  to  me.  Of  these  of  course  I  was  steward 
only. 

Thirdly,  there  was  the  furniture,  plate,  linen,  china, 
books,  prints,  pictures,  and  other  gifts,  given  by  my  uncle's 
will,  made  in  1873,  t0  my  uncle  Dr.  John  Carlyle,  and  by 


136  APPENDIX 

the  codicil  to  Dr.  Carlyle  for  life,  with  remainder  to  me  abso- 
lutely. These,  under  the  circumstances  presently  detailed,  I 
came  to  regard  as  to  be  mine  on  the  death  of  my  uncle 
Thomas  Carlyle,  whether  Dr.  Carlyle  should  be  then  living 
or  not. 

Fourthly,  there  were  my  uncle's  letters,  manuscripts, 
and  papers,  and  his  wife's  jewelry.  These,  under  the  circum- 
stances presently  detailed,  became  mine  in  1875  by  my 
uncle's  gift,  although  I  was  always  anxious  to  observe  any 
wish  he  had  respecting  them,  and  was  naturally  backward  to 
speak  of  them  as  mine  during  his  life,  never  anticipating 
(except  on  the  occasion  which  gave  rise  to  the  correspondence 
of  February,  1880)  that  there  would  be  any  difficulty  after 
my  uncle's  death  respecting  my  ownership  of  them  from  1875. 

The  origin  of  the  gift  was  as  follows  : — 

In  June,  1875,  my  uncle  Thomas  Carlyle  bought  seven  ^1000 
1873  5%  Russian  Bonds  from  our  next  door  neighbour,  Mr.  Laisne', 
a  stockbroker.  On  the  30th  of  June,  1875,  these  bonds  were 
delivered  to  him,  and  as  I  sat  writing  in  the  dining-room  at 
Cheyne  Row  after  breakfast  my  uncle  altogether  unexpectedly 
brought  me  one  of  these  bonds  and  gave  it  to  me  as  a  present. 
He  said  that  he  had  in  addition  to  this  provision  for  me  left  me 
by  his  Will  ^500.  He  also  told  me  that  he  had  left  to  his 
brother  John  (my  uncle  Dr.  John  Carlyle,  who  was  then  staying 
with  us  at  Cheyne  Row)  all  the  things  in  the  house  as  they  stood, 
but  that  he  now  gave  these  same  things  to  me  instead,  which 
arrangement  he  had  explained  to  his  brother  John  who  would  also 
speak  of  it  to  me.  He  also  said  specifically  that  he  gave  me  also 
his  papers  and  his  wife's  jewelry.  He  said,  "  I  give  you  the  papers 
and  all  the  jewels  of  your  aunt."  He  at  the  same  time  gave  into 
my  possession  the  keys  of  these  papers  and  of  his  wife's  jewels, 
which  keys  I  had  never  up  till  that  time  used  except  on  occasions 
when  they  were  lent  to  me  by  him  for  some  specific  purpose.  My 
uncle  John  A.  Carlyle  the  same  day  spoke  of  this  gift  of  a 
thousand  pounds.  He  spoke  of  it  as  being  in  his  opinion  a  small 
provision,  but  he  added,  "  Your  uncle  has  also  given  you  all  the 
things  in  the  house  which  he  has  bequeathed  to  me  by  his  Will. 
I  quite  approve  of  his  doing  so  and  I  renounce  all  claim  upon 
them."     He  again  in  the  evening  spoke  of  the  gift  of  these  things 


APPENDIX  137 

in  the  house  in  the  hearing  of  my  uncle  Thomas  Carlyle.  I 
received  no  other  keys  from  my  uncle  at  this  time.  About  three 
months  later,  on  the  occasion  of  my  return  with  my  uncle  Thomas 
Carlyle  to  Cheyne  Row  after  a  visit  into  Kent,  our  old  house- 
keeper Mrs.  Warren  having  left  us,  I  received  from  my  uncle  I 
think  all  the  keys  of  the  house  with  the  exception  of  the  keys  of 
the  secretaire  and  writing  desk  mentioned  above  as  containing  his 
private  business  papers  and  other  personal  property. 

The  papers  of  which  my  uncle  gave  me  possession  for  myself 
on  the  30th  of  June,  1875,  were  tnen  some  of  them  in  two  cup- 
boards in  the  room  which  had  formerly  been  his  study  and  some 
of  them  in  a  pedestal  chest  of  drawers  in  the  drawing-room.  The 
jewelry,  which  he  considered  very  valuable  (in  it  were  the  brooch 
bracelet  and  chain  which  had  been  sent  to  my  aunt  by  Goethe), 
was  contained  in  two  jewel  boxes  which  were  locked  in  an  old 
chest  of  drawers  on  the  landing  outside  his  bedroom  door. 

From  this  date  (June  1875)  my  uncle  never  dealt  with  any  of 
these  things  without  consulting  me  and  I  regarded  them  as  mine 
and  dealt  with  them  openly  as  such  in  the  following  instances : — 

1.  I  wore  the  jewelry  with  my  uncle's  knowledge  and 
approval. 

2.  I  gave  away  as  mementoes  of  my  aunt  a  gold  compass 
and  a  vinaigrette,  without  asking  my  uncle's  permission. 

3.  In  November,  1876,  I  sent  to  Mr.  Allingham,  then 
editor  of  Fraser's  Magazine,  a  translation  from  Goethe  which 
was  amongst  the  papers  given  to  me  which  Mr.  Allingham 
wished  to  publish,  but,  ultimately,  I  decided  not  to  have  it 
published  because  I  was  unable  to  write  any  introduction 
to  it  which  appeared  to  me  satisfactory.  I  consulted  my 
uncle  about  the  introduction  but  not  about  whether  the  MS. 
should  be  published  or  not.  This  my  uncle  treated  as 
entirely  my  affair. 

4.  About  this  time  my  uncle  told  me  that  Mr.  Allingham 
had  spoken  to  him  concerning  certain  unpublished  articles 
by  my  uncle  which  I  had  lent  him  to  read.  My  uncle  had 
expressed  to  Mr.  Allingham  his  willingness  that  one  of  these 
— an  account  of  a  tour  in  the  Netherlands — should  be  printed 
in  Fraser's  Magazine;  but  my  uncle  said  he  had  told 
Mr.  Allingham  that  the  articles  which  I  had   lent   him   to 


138  APPENDIX 

read  were  mine  and  he  must  consult  with  me.  Mr.  Allingham 
accordingly  asked  my  consent  to  publish  some  of  these 
articles  (amongst  them  the  account  of  a  tour  in  the 
Netherlands)  along  with  the  materials  for  my  uncle's 
biography  which  are  now  in  Mr.  Froude's  hands. 

5.  When  my  uncle  complied  with  a  request  for  his 
autograph  before  1875,  when  he  gave  his  MSS.  to  me,  he 
often  used  a  piece  of  an  old  MS.  for  the  donee.  After  1875 
he  never  did  so,  but  wrote  his  name  instead.  I,  on  the 
other  hand,  when  asked  for  an  autograph  sometimes  used 
his  old  MSS.  without  consulting  my  uncle,  as  I  did  (1)  in  the 
autumn  of  1876  for  Mrs.  Annabella  Anstruther  of  Old 
Ballikinrain,  to  whom  I  gave  a  paper  written  by  my  uncle  on 
a  new  mode  of  roughing  horses  which  was  amongst  the 
papers  my  uncle  had  given  me.  (2)  In  1877  or  1878  for 
Mrs.  Hartpole  Lecky  a  MS.  which,  if  I  remember  rightly, 
formed  part  of  my  uncle's  MS.  of  "  Frederick  II."  Mrs. 
Lecky  asked  me  on  this  occasion,  "  Ought  I  not  to  apply  to 
Mr.  Carlyle  for  it?"  and  I  replied,  "No,  his  MSS.  are  all 
mine."  (3)  In  1878  and  1879,  without  consulting  my  uncle, 
I  cut  from  the  MSS.  he  had  given  me  the  names  in  his 
handwriting  of  several  personages  (e.g.,  Frederick  Wilhelm, 
Marie  Therese,  Maupertuis),  of  whom  we  had  portraits,  and 
affixed  them  to  the  portraits  where  my  uncle  frequently  saw 
them  without  objection. 

6.  I  had  two  letters  of  Thackeray  and  also  a  poem  of 
Goethe  framed  separately  and  hung  up  in  my  own  room, 
and  I  put  a  paper  of  my  uncle  into  my  scrap-book.  These 
I  took  out  of  the  cupboard  referred  to.  My  uncle  often  saw 
them  and  treated  the  appropriation  as  proper. 

7.  In  1877,  after  some  communications  between  my 
uncle  and  Mr.  Froude  as  to  a  biography  of  my  uncle,  my 
uncle  asked  me  to  send  Mr.  Froude  such  of  the  papers  as 
I  thought  would  be  useful  for  that  purpose,  but  told  me 
distinctly  that  he  had  taken  care  I  should  have  them  all  back 
again.  I  was  then,  as  always,  anxious  to  carry  out  every  wish 
of  my  uncle,  and  I  accordingly  sent  almost  all  the  papers  I 
had,  but  I  might  have  retained  all  if  I  had  desired.  I  left 
the  selection  to  Mr.  Froude  of  my  own  free  will  and  without 
my  uncle's  knowledge. 


APPENDIX  139 

8.  On  the  17th  April,  1880,  I  opened  one  of  the  drawers 
in  the  pedestal  chest  in  the  drawing-room  to  look  for  a  paper. 
The  drawer  contained  unpublished  articles  of  my  uncle  on 
various  subjects  (articles,  there  to  this  day,  on  Modern 
Science,  Fenianism,  Trades  Unions,  Skirving,  etc.,  etc.).  It 
was  dark,  and  I  took  out  the  drawer  and  carried  it  to  the 
lamp  beside  which  my  uncle  and  my  husband  were  reading. 
On  turning  over  these  papers  I  came  upon  a  letter  from 
Disraeli  to  my  uncle  and  a  copy  of  his  answer  to  it.  I  said, 
"There  is  Dizzy's  letter  offering  to  make  you  a  Grand 
Knight  of  the  Bath.  Shall  we  show  it  to  Alick?"  (my 
husband,  who  was  sitting  by).  He  answered,  glancing  into 
the  drawer,  "  They  are  all  your  own,  you  may  do  what  you 
like  with  them."  From  this  drawer  I  took  out  an  article  on 
Wilson  (Christopher  North),  sent  it  to  Mr.  Froude,  and  it  is 
now  in  Mr.  Froude's  hands  amongst  the  papers  claimed 
by  me. 

The  following  is  an  instance  of  a  gift  made  to  me  by  my 
uncle  similar  to  the  gift  of  the  papers  where  I  acted  without 
question  as  absolute  owner  in  presenti.  In  February,  1876,  my 
uncle,  Thomas  Carlyle,  gave  me  the  watch,  chain,  and  seals  which 
had  belonged  to  Charles  Dickens,  and  which  were  bequeathed  to 
my  uncle  by  the  late  John  Forster.  I  gave  away  the  watch,  the 
chain,  and  the  seals  in  my  uncle's  lifetime  without  asking  his 
permission. 

I  never  in  my  uncle's  lifetime  had  any  misunderstanding  with 
Mr.  Froude,  who  was  at  all  times  kind  and  courteous  to  me.  I 
was  satisfied  by  my  uncle's  frequent  assurance  that  Mr.  Froude 
understood  the  papers  to  be  mine.  I  very  seldom  spoke  of  them 
as  mine  simply  out  of  delicacy,  not  wishing  to  seem  greedy  about 
property  which  I  knew  my  uncle  had  given  to  me  as  an  immediate 
and  present  gift,  not  postponed  until  his  death  but  yet  in  prospect 
of  that  event.  My  uncle  during  many  years  spoke  of  his  death 
as  near  at  hand.  I  considered  the  papers  referred  to  as  very 
precious,  but  I  never  thought  of  them  as  valuable  in  point  of 
money  until,  as  presently  mentioned,  Mr.  Froude  arranged  with  me 
to  hold  the  proceeds  of  the  "  Reminiscences  "  for  me.  The  only 
occasions  upon  which  Mr.  Froude  used  words  which  led  me  to 
think  that  he  did  not  clearly  understand   all   the  papers   were 


i4o  APPENDIX 

mine  were  those  referred  to  in  the  correspondence  of  February, 
1880. 

On  February  16,  1879,  Mr.  Froude  brought  Mr.  Bret  Harte, 
who  was  staying  with  him,  to  visit  my  uncle  in  Cheyne  Row. 
Before  lunch,  while  Mr.  Bret  Harte  was  talking  with  my  uncle, 
Mr.  Froude  said  to  me  (referring  to  my  present  husband's  father), 
"  Your  uncle  Alick  wrote  the  best  letters  in  the  family.  They  are 
very  interesting  and  I  am  going  to  give  them  to  you."  I  replied, 
"  Oh  !  you  are  going  to  send  me  all  of  them ;  they  are  all  mine." 
After  Mr.  Froude  and  Mr.  Bret  Harte  had  left,  it  occurred  to  me 
to  make  sure  there  should  be  no  mistake  about  the  return  of  the 
papers  to  me.  I  therefore  said  to  my  uncle  I  was  sorry  I  had  sent 
so  many  of  the  papers  to  Mr.  Froude  and  wondered  if  Mr.  Froude 
understood  they  were  to  be  all  returned  to  me.  My  uncle  replied, 
"  Froude  perfectly  understands  that,  for  I  have  often  said  so  to 
him."  I  expressed  a  wish  that  my  uncle  would  speak  to  Mr. 
Froude  again  on  the  subject  so  as  to  prevent  any  misapprehension, 
which  he  promised  to  do.  Mr.  Froude  used  to  come  to  our 
house  twice  a  week,  Tuesdays  and  Fridays,  to  walk  and  latterly  to 
drive  out  with  my  uncle.  On  the  Tuesday  following  the  Sunday 
upon  which  the  above  mentioned  conversation  took  place  my 
uncle  drove  out  with  Mr.  Froude  in  a  hansom  cab.  After  the 
drive  and  after  Mr.  Froude  had  left,  my  uncle  said  to  me, 
"  Froude  perfectly  understands  the  papers  are  yours  and  will 
return  them  all  to  you.     He  has  promised  to  do  so." 

In  February,  1880,  Mr.  Froude  again  spoke  of  returning 
Mr.  Alexander  Carlyle's  letters.  This  to  me  revived  my  fear 
lest  he  might  not  return  the  others.  I  therefore  again  raised  the 
subject  with  my  uncle  in  February,  1880.  He  said  to  me, 
"  Froude  understands  beyond  any  kind  of  doubt  that  they  are 
yours — it  is  no  use  bothering  him  again."  But  I  persisted,  and 
he  promised  me  to  speak  to  Mr.  Froude  about  it  again  for  the 
purpose  of  insuring  that  the  papers  should  be  returned  to  me  as 
soon  as  Mr.  Froude  had  done  with  them. 

Mr.  Froude's  letter  to  me  of  10th  February,  1880,  which  I 
showed  to  my  uncle,  satisfied  both  my  uncle  and  myself  that  no 
further  question  would  be  raised  on  the  subject.  "  That  I  was 
to  have,"  as  Mr.  Froude  there  said,  "  the  entire  collection  when 
he  had  done  with  it,"  appeared  to  me  all  I  wanted. 

The  occasion  upon  which  the  monetary  value  of  the  papers 


APPENDIX  141 

was  first  discussed  was  shortly  after  Mr.  Froude's  letter  to  my 
uncle  of  23rd  September,  1879. 

On  the  20th  of  November,  1879,  my  husband  and  I  dined 
with  Mr.  Froude  at  his  residence,  Mr.  Froude's  son,  Mr.  Ashley 
Froude,  and  his  daughter,  Miss  Margaret  Froude,  being  present. 
On  this  occasion  Mr.  Froude  distinctly  stated  that  he  would  hold 
the  whole  proceeds  of  the  "  Reminiscences "  for  me.  This 
promise  was  frequently  repeated  by  Mr.  Froude,  who,  on  one 
occasion,  a  month  before  my  uncle's  death,  in  the  presence  of 
my  husband,  added,  "  The  book  was  written  by  your  uncle,  not 
by  me,  and  therefore  there  would  be  no  propriety  in  my  receiving 
the  money  for  it.  But  of  course  it  will  be  different  with  the 
Biography,  which  I  shall  write  myself."  My  husband  and  I  both 
assented  to  this,  and  looked  upon  it  as  settled.  My  uncle  was 
informed  of  this  arrangement  on  the  20th  of  November,  1879,  by 
myself  and  my  husband,  and  subsequently  by  Mr.  Froude,  and 
expressed  his  approval  of  it  as  natural  and  proper,  so  that  we 
regarded  it  as  a  settled  thing. 

After  this  arrangement  had  been  made,  and  possibly  to  some 
extent  influenced  by  it,  I  sent  Mr.  Froude,  for  use  and  return  to 
me,  further  papers  which  my  uncle  had  given  me,  especially  the 
letters  of  my  uncle,  Thomas  Carlyle,  to  his  brother,  Dr.  John 
Carlyle,  a  very  large  collection  of  which,  extending  over  sixty 
years,  were  returned  to  my  uncle,  Thomas  Carlyle,  by  Dr.  Carlyle's 
executor  a  few  months  after  the  death  of  Dr.  Carlyle  in  September, 
1879.  These  my  uncle,  Thomas  Carlyle,  gave  me  for  my  own 
as  soon  as  he  received  them,  and  I,  at  his  wish,  lent  them  to 
Mr.  Froude,  relying  on  his  promise  to  restore  all  the  papers  to 
me  when  used  for  the  purpose  of  the  Biography. 

On  the  21st  of  February,  1881,  the  will  and  codicil  of  my 
uncle  were  read  by  Mr.  Ouvry  in  the  presence  of  Sir  J.  F.  Stephen 
and  myself  and  my  husband,  but  Mr.  Froude  was  not  present. 
Immediately  after  the  will  was  read  Sir  J.  Stephen  said,  "  There 
is  too  the  question  of  the  papers."  I  answered,  "  Yes ;  Froude 
has  no  right  to  say  what  he  said  in  the  Times,  he  has  no  right  to 
burn  them  ;  the  papers  are  mine."  Sir  James  Stephen  said,  "  Do 
you  mean  to  say  that  you  want  a  share  in  the  profits  ?  "  I  said, 
"  No ;  but  Froude  is  to  return  all  the  papers  to  me ;  he  has 
promised  to  do  so,"  and  thereupon  I  showed  Sir  James  Stephen 
Mr.   Froude's  letter  of  10th  February,   1880.     Mr.   Ouvry  then 


i42  APPENDIX 

said,  "  There  is  too  the  question  of  the  c  Reminiscences  ' ;  I  think 
Mrs.  Carlyle  was  to  have  the  profits  of  that  book."  I  said, 
"Yes;  Mr.  Froude  has  promised  them  to  me."  Sir  James 
Stephen  then  said  that  what  I  had  said  was  entirely  satisfactory, 
and  proposed  that  it  should  be  reduced  by  him  to  writing. 

I  was  at  the  time  extremely  tired  ;  I  had  not  thought  the 
matter  over  nor  taken  either  professional  advice  or  that  of  my 
husband,  and  was  in  consequence  not  at  all  in  a  fit  state  to 
transact  business;  but  alarmed  by  what  I  had  heard  shortly 
before,  that  the  whole  matter  might  have  to  be  thrown  into 
Chancery,  I  consented  to  Sir  James  Stephen's  suggestion.  Sir 
James  Stephen  then  drew  up  a  memorandum,  which  differed  from 
that  which  afterwards  passed  in  this,  that  it  was  said  that  the 
papers  were  given  "  by  Mr.  Carlyle  "  instead  of  simply  given,  and 
that  all  the  words  after  "  the  use  to  be  made  of  these  papers " 
were  wanting.  I  objected  to  this,  saying  the  papers  were  sent 
by  me,  not  by  my  uncle,  and  I  strongly  protested  that  Mr.  Froude 
had  no  right  to  burn  any  of  the  papers.  Thereupon  Sir  James 
Stephen  asked  whether  I  thought  that  practically  he  would  burn 
any  of  them,  and  pressed  me  as  to  whether  I  had  not  sent  the 
MSS.  by  order  of  my  uncle,  but  I  persisted  this  was  not  so.  Sir 
James  Stephen  then  tore  up  the  first  memorandum  and  wrote 
another,  leaving  out  after  given  the  words  "  by  Mr.  Carlyle  "  and 
adding  the  words  at  the  end,  "  On  the  other  hand  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle," 
etc.,  as  the  paragraph  now  stands. 

I  agreed  to  the  memorandum  in  this  form,  understanding  by 
it  that  I  was  to  have  the  entire  collection  of  the  MSS.  with  the 
profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences,"  Mr.  Froude  having  the  profits  of 
the  Biography. 

It  was  only  in  this  sense  that  the  memorandum  expressed 
what  I  understood. 

The  parol  evidence  which  was  collected  in  support  of  the  gift 
to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  of  her  uncle's  papers  is  next  given. 

Alexander  Carlyle. 

I  am  a  nephew  of  the  late  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle,  a  son  of  his 
brother  Alexander.  I  married  my  cousin,  then  Miss  Mary 
Carlyle  Aitken,  on  the  21st  of  August,  1879.  After  our  marriage 
we  continued  to  live  at  Cheyne  Row  and  to  have  the  care  of 


APPENDIX  143 

Mr.  Carlyle,  as  my  wife  had  before  our  marriage.  We  still  live 
at  Cheyne  Row.  I  came  to  England  from  Canada  in  July,  1879, 
and  therefore  know  nothing  of  the  manuscripts  of  my  late  uncle 
before  that  date.  After  coming  to  England  I  heard  from  my  wife 
that  my  uncle  had  given  her  his  MSS.  I  was  present  at  and 
remember  the  following  occasion  upon  which  my  uncle  spoke  of 
the  MSS.  as  the  property  of  my  wife  : — 

On  the  17th  of  April,  1880,  I  was  reading  with  my  uncle  in 
the  drawing-room  at  Cheyne  Row,  and  my  wife  was  searching 
through  one  of  the  drawers  of  a  pedestal  chest  of  drawers  in  the 
drawing-room  full  of  his  MSS.  My  wife  brought  the  drawer  to 
the  lamp,  beside  which  my  uncle  and  I  were  reading,  and  taking 
out  a  letter  from  Disraeli  to  my  uncle  and  a  copy  of  his  reply  to 
it,  my  wife  said  to  my  uncle,  "  There  is  Dizzy's  letter  offering  to 
make  you  a  G.C.B.  Shall  we  show  it  to  Alick  ?  " — meaning  me. 
My  uncle  glanced  into  the  drawer  and  replied  to  my  wife  :  "  They 
are  all  your  own;  you  may  do  what  you  like  with  them."  I 
confirm  the  account  given  by  my  wife  (in  her  proof  which  I  have 
read)  of  the  interview  with  Sir  James  Stephen  and  Mr.  Ouvry  on 
the  21st  of  February,  1881,  after  the  will  was  read. 

Mrs.  Jane  Carlyle  Aitken. 

I  was  the  sister  of  the  late  Thomas  Carlyle  and  John  Aitken 
Carlyle,  and  am  the  mother  of  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle,  who  resided  with 
my  brother  Thomas.  My  brother  Dr.  John  Carlyle  has  frequently 
said  to  me  that  the  things  in  the  house  at  Cheyne  Row  were  left 
to  him  by  the  will  of  my  brother  Thomas,  but  were  my  daughter 
Mary's.  The  last  occasion  upon  which  he  did  so  was  in  the 
spring  of  1878  at  our  house,  The  Hill,  Dumfries,  after  his  return 
home  from  Cheyne  Row.  We  were  speaking  of  our  brother 
Thomas's  failing  health.  My  brother  John  said  to  me,  "  Mary 
has  a  heavy  task  and  does  it  well ;  her  uncle  has  left  her  ^"500." 
I  remarked  that  "  it  was  a  limited  provision  in  the  circumstances 
if  one  had  been  studying  that."  My  brother  replied,  "  Yes,  but 
Tom  and  I  have  arranged  that  all  the  things  in  the  house  which 
have  been  left  to  me  are  Mary's." 

Miss  Ann  Aitken. 

I  am  the  sister  of  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle.  I  resided  for  many  years 
in  the  same  house  with  my  uncle,  Dr.  John  A.  Carlyle.     On  one 


i44  APPENDIX 

occasion,  about  May,  1878,  my  uncle  John  said  to  me,  referring 
to  my  uncle  Thomas,  "  Your  uncle  has  left  all  the  things  in  his 
house  to  me,  but  they  are  Mary's."  By  "  Mary  "  he  intended  my 
sister,  now  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle.  I  am  quite  sure  he  used  the  words 
"  are  Mary's."  He  did  not  particularise  the  things  in  the  house. 
On  the  same  occasion  my  uncle  John  told  me  it  had  been  agreed 
between  him  and  my  uncle  Thomas  that  what  my  uncle  Thomas 
had  by  his  will  left  to  my  uncle  John  should  be  my  sister  Mary's. 

Mr.  W.  Allingham.     Late  Editor  of  Eraser's  Magazine. 
{Extract  from  a  letter  written  by   Witness.) 

Towards  the  end  of  1876  I  had  some  talk  with  Mr.  Carlyle 
about  publishing  papers  of  his  in  Erasers  Magazine,  of  which 
I  was  then  the  Editor.  He  referred  the  matter  to  Miss  Mary 
Aitken,  who  sent  me  several  MSS.  to  examine,  part  of  which  I 
was  very  desirous  to  have  for  publication.  But  on  going  to 
Cheyne  Row  some  days  afterwards  I  found  that  Miss  Aitken  had 
changed  her  mind  and  would  not  allow  the  articles  to  be  published 
by  Longman.  I  argued  a  little  against  this,  but  she  persisted  in 
her  opinion,  and  Carlyle  left  the  matter  in  her  hands,  so  I  returned 
all  the  MSS.  to  her  and  said  no  more  about  it. 


Paul  Frederick  Friedmann,  Esq.,  of  The  Boltons. 

I  was  a  friend  of  the  late  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle,  with  whom  I 
frequently  went  out  driving.  On  one  of  the  last  occasions  that  I 
went  out  with  Mr.  Carlyle  we  spoke  of  Victor  Hugo.  I  mentioned 
Goethe's  expression  about  Hugo's  plays — "bloody  marionettes." 
Carlyle  laughed  and  told  me  that  Goethe  had  written  to  him, 
saying  of  Hugo's  works,  "  Von  dieser  Litteratur  bitte  ich  sich  fern 
zu  halten"  ("  of  this  literature  I  pray  to  keep  aloof"),  or  very  nearly 
such  words.  I  asked  him  if  he  had  many  letters  of  Goethe ;  he 
said,  "  Yes,  a  good  many."  I  said  they  must  be  very  interesting 
and  asked  what  he  had  done  with  them,  if  he  had  given  them  to 
Lewes  for  Goethe's  Life.  He  said,  "  Oh,  no,  Mary  has  them  all," 
and  either  added,  "  I  have  given  them  all  to  her  "  or  "  They  are  all 
hers,"  or  words  to  that  effect,  from  which  I  clearly  understood 
that  they  were  actually  her  property.  I  said  I  hoped  Miss  Aitken 
would  publish  them  some  day.     He  said,  "  Oh,  yes,  when  I  am 


APPENDIX  145 

gone,"  or  nearly  such  words.     We  afterwards  spoke  of  Lewes, 
George  Eliot,  Thackeray. 

I  inferred  from  Carlyle's  words  that  what  I  had  heard  of  his 
having  given  all  his  papers  to  Miss  Aitken  was  true  and  forbore 
asking  him  (as  I  had  otherwise  intended)  for  a  book  Goethe  had 
given  him.  I  had  been  reminded  of  this  book  when  he  told  me 
of  the  letters  and  had  therefore  intentionally  brought  the  conversa- 
tion to  the  point  where  he  told  me  that  the  letters  were  Miss 
Aitken's.  We  did  not  speak  of  his  books  nor  as  far  as  I  remember 
of  his  manuscripts  in  general.  I  remember  no  other  conversation 
with  Carlyle  about  his  manuscripts.  I  have  never  seen  the  letters 
of  Goethe  and  do  not  know  whether  the  passage  really  occurs  in 
them.  I  cannot  swear  to  any  exact  words,  but  I  have  a  distinct 
recollection  of  the  conversation  and  that  I  clearly  understood 
Thomas  Carlyle  to  say  that  the  letters  of  Goethe  belonged  to 
Miss  Aitken.  I  am  quite  certain  that  he  did  not  say  that  they 
would  be  hers. 

Mrs.  E.  A.  Venturi,  Sister-in-law  of  Mr.  Stansfeld,  M.P. 

I  was  a  friend  of  the  late  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle.  I  remember 
talking  with  him  shortly  after  Mazzini's  death  in  1872  upon  the 
question  of  one's  responsibility  with  regard  to  private  letters  of 
friends  and  telling  him  that  it  was  Mazzini's  habit  to  burn  all 
intimate  letters  as  soon  as  possible  after  receipt  of  them.  He 
appeared  to  approve  of  this,  in  Mazzini's  case,  but  to  my  surprise 
not  as  a  general  rule.  I  distinctly  remember  that  he  told  me  that 
he  had  not  adopted  this  practice  and  added  that  it  could  lead  to 
no  mischief  as  all  his  letters  and  papers  would  "  ultimately  "  come 
to  Miss  Aitken.  On  a  later  occasion,  probably  before  1877,  Miss 
Aitken,  sitting  beside  her  uncle  Thomas  Carlyle  with  her  hand  on 
his  knee,  told  me,  in  his  presence  and  hearing,  that  he  (Miss  Aitken 
called  him  "Bester")  had  given  her  all  his  letters  and  papers. 
He  appeared  to  me  to  entirely  accept  what  Miss  Aitken  said,  but 
I  do  not  remember  that  he  made  any  remark. 

Mrs.  Annabella  A.  Anstruther,  of  Cassillis  House,  Ayr. 

I  was  a  friend  of  the  late  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle.  In  the 
summer  or  autumn  of  1876  Miss  Aitken  made  me  a  present  from 
herself  of  the  following  papers  : — 

L 


i46  APPENDIX 

i.  A  MS.  of  Carlyle  on  a  method  of  roughing  horses. 

2.  Another  MS.  of  Carlyle  beginning  "  But  how  is  the 
artist  to  guard  himself  from  the  corruptions  of  his  time  ?  " 

3.  Another  small  piece  in  blue  pencil. 

4.  A  separate  autograph  and  several  photographs  of 
Carlyle,  his  wife  and  his  mother. 

Afterwards,  whilst  Carlyle  was  staying  on  a  visit  with  us  at  Old 
Ballikinrain,  I  mentioned  the  gift  to  him.  He  appeared  to  me  to 
approve  of  the  gift  as  a  gift  from  his  niece,  not  from  himself. 
One  of  his  expressions  was,  "  Mary  has  plenty  more  of  that 
rubbish,"  meaning  his  handwriting.  The  impression  I  received 
from  the  conversation  was  that  Miss  Aitken  had  entire  control  of 
her  uncle's  papers. 

These  statements,  accompanied  by  a  narrative  of  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle's  case  and  the  whole  of  the  correspondence  to 
date,  including  the  communications  with  Sir  James  Stephen 
which  were  entered  upon  for  the  express  purpose  of  inter- 
changing without  reserve  all  that  could  be  said  on  either  side 
for  or  against  the  respective  claims  of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle, 
Froude  and  Carlyle's  executors  and  also  the  Case  presently 
mentioned  which  was  drafted  by  Sir  James  Stephen  on  behalf  of 
Carlyle's  executors,  and  the  opinion  of  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins 
upon  it,  were  submitted  by  Messrs.  Benson  in  July,  1881,  to 
Mr.  Cozens-Hardy,  who  was  asked  to  advise  in  response  to  the 
following  questions : — 

Questions  submitted  to  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy. 

"  What  are  the  respective  rights  of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle, 
Mr.  Froude,  Carlyle's  executors,  and  others  in  relation  to — 

"  First,  the  ownership  of  the  MSS.,  letters,  family  papers 
and  materials  generally ; 

"Secondly,  the  right  of  publication,  and  the  use  of  the 
material  for  that  purpose ; 

"Thirdly,  the  copyright  and  profits,  and  generally  what 
course  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  is  entitled  to  take  to  secure 
what  she  considers  due  to  her  uncle's  memory  and  the 
benefits  he  intended  for  her  ?  " 


APPENDIX  147 

Mr.  Cozens-Hardy's  Opinion  : — 

8/7;  July,  1 88 1. 

t.  Prima  facie  the  right  to  the  manuscript  letters  and 

family  papers  vests   in  the   executors   of  the   late  Thomas 

Carlyle.      I  think,  however,  that  there  is  good  ground  for 

contending  that  the   ownership   of  these   documents  is  not 

vested   in   the   executors,  but   is  vested  in  Mrs.  Alexander 

Carlyle,  to  whom  they  were  given  by  her  uncle  in  June,  1875. 

It  appears  from  the  accompanying  Statements  that  what  took 

place  amounted  to  an  immediate  present  gift,  as  distinguished 

from  an  intention  to  give,  and  moreover  that  the  fact  of  such 

a  gift   was   repeatedly  acknowledged  by  Mr.  Carlyle  in  a 

manner    which    will    supply   that    corroboration    which    is 

necessary  to  support  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  claim.     This 

being  so,  I  think  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  is  entitled  to  claim  the 

documents   from   Mr.  Froude   or  from   the  executors.     In 

saying  this,  I  do  not  of  course  intend  to  say  that  Mr.  Froude 

may  not  use  for  the  purpose  of  the  Biography  the  letters  which 

were  lent  to  him  by  Mrs.  Carlyle  for  that  express  purpose. 

2.  I  think  that  the  right  of  publication  passes  with  the 
ownership  of  the  letters  and  other  papers,  except  so  far  as  the 
writers  of  any  letters  addressed  to  Mr.  Carlyle  or  their  legal 
personal  representatives  may  interfere  by  injunction  to 
restrain  the  publication. 

3.  I  think  that  the  copyright  and  the  profits  to  be  derived 
from  the  publication  will  also  belong  to  Mrs.  Carlyle,  subject, 
however,  to  this  qualification.  Mrs.  Carlyle  permitted  Mr. 
Froude  to  have  the  documents  and  to  publish  part  of  them 
in  the  volumes  of  "  Reminiscences  " ;  and  I  am  not  prepared 
to  say  that  she  can  as  of  right  prevent  the  republication  of 
the  "  Reminiscences."  It  seems  that  in  1879,  before  the 
publication  was  resolved  upon  or  finally  authorised,  Mr. 
Froude  agreed  that  all  the  profits  to  be  derived  from  that 
publication  should  belong  to  Mrs.  Carlyle.  See  his  letters  of 
the  21st  and  23rd  February,  1881.  But  I  understand  that 
Mrs.  Carlyle  has  agreed  to  allow  Mr.  Froude  to  retain  ^3  00 
out  of  the  profits  arising  from  the  sale  of  the  "  Reminiscences," 
and  that  Mr.  Froude  has  assented  to  this  and  agrees  to  assign 
the  copyright  to  her. 

Herbert  H.  Cozens-Hardv, 

7,  New  Square,  Lincoln's  Inn. 
L    2 


148  APPENDIX 

Whilst  the  case  upon  which  this  opinion  was  given  was  being 
drafted,  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  heard  that  Sir  James  Stephen  in 
consultation  with  Froude  was  also  drafting  a  case  on  the  part  of 
Carlyle's  executors  for  the  opinion  of  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins  as 
to  the  claims  of  the  executors  on  behalf  of  the  residuary  legatees. 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  therefore,  desired  Messrs.  Benson  to 
send  to  Sir  James  Stephen  the  first  draft  of  the  case  which  they 
were  preparing  on  her  behalf  for  the  double  purpose  of  helping 
Sir  James  Stephen  to  state  the  facts  correctly  and  of  obtaining 
from  him,  for  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy's  consideration,  all  that  either  he 
or  Froude  could  urge  against  her  claims. 

Early  in  June,  i88t,  Messrs.  Benson  sent  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  case,  so  far  as  it  was  then  drafted,  to  Sir  James  Stephen 
without  the  Statements  above  set  out,  which,  not  being  then 
complete,  were  reserved  for  later  communication,  and  at  his 
request  authorised  him  to  communicate  the  draft  case  to  Mr. 
Ouvry  and  Froude,  asking  Sir  James  Stephen,  however,  to  treat  it 
as  "  still  imperfect  and  therefore  susceptible  without  comment  of 
any  corrections  which  further  consideration  or  research  might 
render  necessary." 

Meantime,  without  waiting  for  the  assistance  which,  in 
stating  the  facts  for  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins'  opinion,  he  might 
have  obtained  by  communication  with  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's 
solicitors,  Sir  James  Stephen  had,  on  the  13th  of  May,  1881, 
obtained  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins'  opinion  in  favour  of  the  execu- 
tors' claims  to  the  papers,  upon  a  statement  which  is  not  merely 
imperfect  in  many  important  particulars,  but,  in  some,  opposed 
to  the  facts  as  we  now  know  them. 

Upon  the  statement  submitted  to  him,  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins' 
advice  could  not  have  been  other  than  it  was,  but  his  opinion 
was  without  value,  because  he  was  not  furnished  with  the  State- 
ments given  above  which  were  submitted  to  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy 
with  the  corroborative  letters  from  which  many  quotations  have 
already  been  made. 

Nevertheless,  Mr.  Vaughan  Hawkins'  opinion,  as  well  as  the 
letters  of  Sir  James  Stephen,  expressing  his  own  views,  were 
submitted  to  and  considered  by  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy  before  he 
wrote  his  opinion. 

On  the  28th  of  June,  1881,  Messrs.  Benson  sent  to  Sir  James 
Stephen  a  copy  of  the  above-mentioned  Statements,  in  support  of 
the  gift  of  the  papers  to  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  in  1875,  suggesting 


APPENDIX  149 

that  they  would  influence  the  opinion  he  had  expressed  adverse 
to  this  gift,  and  adding,  "  The  case  is  not  a  party  and  party  state- 
ment but  comprises  all  the  materials  we  have  been  able  to  gather, 
whichever  way  they  tell." 

On  the  5th  of  July,  1881,  Sir  James  Stephen  replied  that  the 
new  matter  had  "not  weakened,  but  confirmed"  the  opinion 
expressed  in  his  letter  of  the  10th  of  June,  1881,  and,  after  giving 
his  reasons  for  doubting  the  accuracy  of  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's 
account  of  her  uncle's  gift  to  her  and  saying  that  he  saw  no  reason 
to  disbelieve  Froude's  statement  as  to  the  authority  given  to  him 
to  burn  the  letters  and  papers,  he  proceeded  as  follows : — 

"  No  doubt  the  language  of  Mr.  Froude's  letters  to  the  Times 
favours  Mrs.  Carlyle's  claim,  but  what  he  wrote  in  1881  cannot 
alter  the  legal  effect  of  things  said  and  done  years  before,  and,  it 
must  be  remembered,  that  he  has  always  admitted  that  Mr.  Carlyle 
desired  him  to  return  all  the  papers  to  Mrs.  Carlyle  when  he  had 
done  with  them.  On  the  other  hand,  he  has  the  papers  and 
prima  facie  they  are  his. 

"  The  claim  of  the  executors  on  behalf  of  the  estate  is  free 
from  the  difficulty  which  always  attends  claims  founded  on 
recollections  of  conversations  to  which  there  is  only  one  living 
witness  and  which  took  place  (if  at  all)  several  years  before  the 
claim  is  decided,  but  our  claim  is  open  to  this  remark,  its 
enforcement  would  do  no  good  to  anyone  and  would  certainly 
defeat  Mr.  Carlyle's  intentions  both  by  depriving  Mrs.  Carlyle  of 
the  profits  of  the  '  Reminiscences '  and  by  hampering  Mr.  Froude 
(to  an  extent  which  depends  on  the  determination  of  an  entirely 
new  and  doubtful  point  of  law)  in  making  use  of  the  papers  for 
biographical  purposes. 

"  The  result  is  that  in  every  view  of  the  case  a  settlement  appears 
advisable,  and  I  earnestly  recommend  the  parties  concerned  to 
adopt  either  the  terms  which  I  proposed  in  my  last  letter  [i.e.,  the 
letter  of  10th  June,  1881,  above  referred  to]  or  some  modifica- 
tion of  them.  I  should  be  much  surprised  if  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy, 
or  any  independent  person  whose  opinion  may  be  taken  on  the 
subject,  did  not  recognise  the  force  of  these  observations." 

Messrs.  Benson  replied  on  the  20th  of  July,  1881,  inclosing  a 
copy  of  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy's  opinion,  and  after  dealing  with  the 
reasons  given  by  Sir  James  Stephen  for  doubting  the  accuracy  of 
Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle's  statement,  they  expressed  as  follows  her 


i5o  APPENDIX 

response  to  the  suggestions  made  by  Sir  James  Stephen  in  his 
letter  of  the  ioth  of  June  : — 

"  We  are  desired  to  state  at  the  outset  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  declines 
to  receive  the  proceeds  of  the  '  Reminiscences '  as  a  gift  from  Mr. 
Froude,  but  claims  them  in  accordance  with  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy's 
opinion  as  a  right  for  the  origin  of  which  she  will  be  indebted  to 
her  uncle  and  not  to  Mr.  Froude,  but  we  do  not  think  a  difference 
of  opinion  on  this  point  between  Mrs.  Carlyle  and  Mr.  Froude 
ought  to  affect  any  amicable  arrangement  which  might  otherwise 
be  made. 

"  Having  made  this  statement,  we  are  instructed  that  Mrs. 
Carlyle  is  willing  that  a  friendly  settlement  should  be  effected  on 
the  following  terms  : — 

"  i.  Mr.  Froude  at  once  to  act  upon  his  letter  to  the  Times 
of  9th  May,  1 88 1,  and  deliver  all  the  papers  to  Mrs.  Carlyle. 

"  2.  The  executors  to  sanction  this  delivery  upon  having 
either  the  written  consent  of  the  residuary  legatees  or  a  sub- 
stantial and  approved  indemnity  (which  we  believe  we  are 
in  a  position  to  offer)  against  any  claim  which  may  be 
made  by  any  residuary  legatee,  whose  written  consent  is  not 
obtained,  against  the  executors  in  respect  of  the  papers  so 
delivered. 

"  3.  Mr.  Froude  to  give  up  all  claim  to  any  further  use 
of  or  profit  from  the  papers  so  delivered,  which  Mrs.  Carlyle 
will  treat  as  given  to  her  by  her  uncle  in  his  lifetime. 

"  4.  On  the  other  hand,  Mrs.  Carlyle  to  give  up  the  whole 
profits,  present  and  future,  as  well  as  the  copyright,  of  the 
"  Reminiscences,"  so  that  as  far  as  Mrs.  Carlyle  is  concerned, 
Mr.  Froude  will  at  once  receive  for  his  own  benefit  ^1,500 
now  in  hand  from  this  source." 

Further  correspondence  took  place,  in  the  course  of  which 
there  was  a  practical  recognition  of  the  justice  of  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  claim  by  Sir  James  Stephen,  for  on  the  19th  of  August, 
1 88 1,  Messrs.  Farrer,  Ouvry  &  Co.  wrote  to  Messrs.  Benson  in 
these  terms  :  "  We  send  you  a  copy  of  a  letter  that  has  been 
addressed  to  Mr.  Froude,  and  Sir  Fitz- James  Stephen,  who  has 
sent  it  to  us,  points  out  that  Mrs,  A.  Carlyle,  by  giving  the  papers 
to  Mr.  Froude  tinder  the  circumstances  as  stated  by  herself,  has 


APPENDIX  151 

induced  him  to  bestow  several  years  of  great  labour  upon 
them,  and  thus  has  practically  contracted  with  him  that  he 
should  write  the  life  of  the  late  Mr.  Carlyle,  using  the  papers  as 
his  materials." 

To  this  Messrs.  Benson  replied  that  "  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle, 
without  entirely  concurring  with  Sir  James  Stephen  as  to  the 
extent  of  Mr.  Froude's  labours,  has  so  far  recognised  the  justice 
of  the  view  expressed  by  him  as  to  provide  for  the  payment  of 
a  very  considerable  sum  [the  whole  profits  of  the  '  Remini- 
scences,' in  respect  of  which  ^1,500  was  in  hand]  to  Mr.  Froude 
as  part  of  the  proposed  compromise." 

In  September,  1881,  a  long  conference  took  place  between 
Sir  James  Stephen  and  Dr.  Benson  at  the  office  of  Messrs.  Farrer, 
Ouvry  &  Co.  with  a  view  to  an  amicable  arrangement,  but  imme- 
diately after  that  conference  Sir  James  Stephen  addressed  a  letter 
to  Mr.  Farrer,  to  be  forwarded  to  Dr.  Benson,  in  which  the 
following  passages  occurred  : — 

"  I  am  not  quite  sure  whether  in  the  course  of  my  conversation 
with  Mr.  Benson  I  made  one  point  clear,  namely,  that  if  matters 
came  to  an  extremity,  Mr.  Froude  will  not  admit  his  liability, 
either  legal  or  moral,  to  give  Mrs.  Carlyle  any  part  of  the 
proceeds  of  the  '  Reminiscences.'  He  is,  and  always  has  been, 
willing  to  make  over  the  amount,  less  ^300,  to  her,  if  she  will 
accept  it  as  a  present  from  him.  For  the  sake  of  peace  he  is 
willing  that  the  amount,  less  ^300,  shall  be  accepted  by  her 
without  any  statement  being  made  as  to  her  title  to  it,  but  if  she 
rejects  the  money  as  a  present  and  sues  him  for  the  papers  and 
the  ^1,500,  he  will  stand  on  his  rights  and  refuse  to  give  her 
anything  at  all,  except  what  the  law  compels  him  to  give,  and  he 
would  take  up  this  position  whether  the  tribunal  chosen  was  a 
court  of  law  or  an  arbitrator.  .  .  .  Will  you  kindly  send  Mr.  Benson 
a  copy  of  this  ?  I  hope  he  will  allow  me  to  congratulate  him  on 
the  good  feeling  and  gentlemanlike  manner  which  he  showed  in  a 
matter  which  required  much  delicacy  and  also  on  his  firmness  and 
acuteness  in  respect  of  his  client's  interests.  I  may  just  add  that 
I  am  quite  convinced  that  Mr.  Froude  will  not  give  way  on  the 
subject  of  writing  Mr.  Carlyle's  Life.  He  feels  that  it  would  be 
injurious  and  humiliating  to  him  to  do  so,  and  I  entirely  agree 
with  him." 


152  APPENDIX 

Strange  doctrine  to  fall  from  the  pen  of  a  nineteenth-century 
jurist !  True,  says  Sir  James  Stephen  in  effect,  in  his  letter  to 
Messrs.  Benson,  of  ioth  June,  1881,  Carlyle  intended  his  manu- 
scripts for  his  niece.  True,  he  added  in  his  letter  of  the  5th  July 
following,  a  claim  to  them  by  his  executors  would  defeat  his 
intentions  and  do  no  good  to  anyone.  True,  going  back  to  his 
letter  of  the  ioth  June,  Carlyle  died  in  the  faith  of  Froude's 
engagement,  that  his  niece  who  solaced  his  declining  years  should 
have  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences,"  and  but  for  this  faith 
would  probably  have  made  better  provision  for  her ;  and  yet ! 
Unless  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  will  humble  herself  to  accept  as 
a  present  from  Froude,  on  whom  she  had  no  claim,  what  she 
owed  to  her  uncle ;  unless  she  will  deny  Froude's  own  statement 
that  the  "  Reminiscences "  were  written  by  her  uncle,  and  that 
there  would  be  no  propriety  in  his  receiving  the  profits  of 
them,  and  confess  that  on  the  contrary  the  profits  are  his,  and 
that  only  his  generosity  and  not  his  engagement  with  her  uncle 
and  herself  can  make  them  hers ;  unless  she  will  do  all  this, 
then  Froude  will  take  advantage,  and  will  be  morally  entitled  to 
take  advantage,  and  Carlyle's  executors  will  help  him  to  take 
advantage  and  will  be  morally  entitled  to  do  so,  of  the  flaw  in  her 
legal  title  which  Mr.  Cozens-Hardy  denied,  but  upon  which  Sir 
James  Stephen  insisted,  to  defeat  Carlyle's  intentions,  and  to 
deprive  his  niece  of  part  of  the  provision  made  for  her. 

According  to  Sir  James  Stephen's  letters  of  ioth  June  and 
5th  July,  Carlyle's  intentions  and  Froude's  undertakings  to  give 
effect  to  them  are  beyond  question,  and  only  the  claims  of  the 
executors  and  residuary  legatees  stand  in  the  way.  In  September 
the  claims  of  the  executors  and  residuary  legatees,  which  were 
never  serious,  have  disappeared,  and  it  is  Froude  who  is  to  keep 
both  papers  and  profits,  unless  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  will  solicit 
his  bounty.  Froude's  liability  to  fulfil  his  admitted  engagement 
with  Carlyle  and  his  niece  is  acknowledged,  only  so  long  as  Mrs. 
Alexander  Carlyle  refrains  from  asserting  it.  A  moral  debt  is 
wiped  out  when  the  creditor  insists  on  its  payment ! 

Messrs.  Benson  replied  to  Sir  James  Stephen's  letter  by  a 
letter  to  Messrs.  Farrer,  Ouvry  &  Co.,  which  we  give  in  full,  as 
it  is  a  clear  and  comprehensive  statement  of  Mrs.  Alexander 
Carlyle's  case : — 


APPENDIX  153 


1,  Clement's  Inn, 

2>th  October,  1881. 

Dear  Sirs, — 

We  have  your  letter  of  the  20th  of  September,  enclosing  a 
copy  of  Sir  James  Stephen's  letter  to  you  which  he  wished  us 
to  see. 

We  are  unwilling  to  prolong  controversy  on  minor  issues 
which  may  tend  rather  to  obscure  and  complicate  than  clear  the 
main  issue,  but  we  cannot  leave  Mr.  Froude's  view  of  his  moral 
obligations  as  now  expressed  by  Sir  James  Stephen  on  record  in 
writing  without  similarly  recording  Mrs.  Carlyle's  reply. 

We  are  dealing  for  the  moment  only  with  the  moral  aspect  of 
a  mixed  question  of  law  and  morals. 

We  say  that  from  this  point  of  view  the  mode  of  settlement 
proposed  by  Mr.  Froude  involves  no  concession  whatever  on  his 
part. 

We  understand  Sir  James  Stephen  to  suggest  that  a  voluntary 
gift  is  revocable  on  breach  of  an  implied  condition  that  its 
recipient  shall  expressly  admit  its  voluntary  character,  and  that 
Mr.  Froude's  obligations  in  respect  both  of  the  profits  of  the 
"  Reminiscences  "  and  of  the  disposition  of  the  materials  for  the 
"Biography"  were  in  their  origin  voluntary  gifts. 

We  venture  to  doubt  the  major  premiss. 

Mr.  Froude  has  emphatically  denied  the  minor. 

We  purposely  refrain  from  discussing  the  legal  aspect  of  the 
question  involved  in  the  minor  premiss,  but  we  ask  Sir  James 
Stephen  to  consider  what  view  Mr.  Froude  was  morally  bound  to 
take  of  that  question  and  the  view  he  actually  took. 

First  as  regards  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences."  This 
part  of  the  question  has  been  simplified  by  the  arrangement  that 
Mr.  Froude  shall  retain  ^300  in  respect  of  his  editorial  labour 
and  the  extra  profit  consequent  upon  the  addition  of  "  Jane 
Welsh  Carlyle  "  to  the  book. 

In  speaking  of  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences  "  therefore, 
we  mean  the  profits  less  ,£300,  and  we  omit  to  take  further 
account  of  the  matters  in  respect  of  which  this  deduction  was 
arranged.  What  remains  is  to  inquire  whether  Mr.  Froude  as  a 
man  of  strict  and  sensitive  honour  might  have  retained  for  his 
own  use  the  profits  derived  from  the  publication  for  Mr.  Carlyle 
of  a  work  written  by  Mr.  Carlyle.     Mr.  Froude  thought  not  and 


i54  APPENDIX 

said  so.  Here  are  his  own  words  to  Mr.  and  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  a 
month  before  the  death  of  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle :  "  The  book 
was  written  by  your  uncle,  not  by  me,  and  there  would  be  no 
propriety  in  my  receiving  the  money  for  it."  But  this  is  not  all. 
Whether  Mr.  Froude  might  have  retained  the  profits  of  the 
"  Reminiscences "  with  propriety  or  not,  he  arranged  with  Mr. 
Thomas  Carlyle  in  his  lifetime  that  he  would  not  do  so,  but 
would  treat  them  in  accordance  with  Mr.  Carlyle's  wishes  on  the 
subject  as  belonging  to  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle,  and  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle 
died  in  the  belief  that  these  profits  were  part  of  the  provision  he 
had  made  for  his  niece.  See  the  published  correspondence 
between  Messrs.  Scribner  and  Messrs.  Harper  of  New  York. 
See  also  Mr.  Froude's  letters  to  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  dated  2 1  February, 
1 88 1,  and  23  February,  1881. 

In  the  former  Mr.  Froude  says,  "  Of  course  you  shall  have 
every  farthing  that  comes  from  the  '  Reminiscences,'  and  I 
appeal  to  your  good  sense  to  acquit  me  of  having  attempted  to 
go  back  from  an  engagement." 

In  the  latter  Mr.  Froude  warmly  apologises  for  a  confused 
memory  having  "  led  me  to  believe  that  I  was  free  to  arrange  the 
details  over  again." 

See  also  the  Agreement  on  the  subject  between  Mrs.  A. 
Carlyle  and  Mr.  Froude  effected  by  Sir  James  Stephen  and 
contained  in  Mrs.  Carlyle's  letter  to  him  dated  27  February,  1881, 
and  his  reply  of  the  same  date.  This  would  seem  to  include  the 
assent  of  the  Executors  independently  of  their  present  willingness 
not  to  interfere  with  any  arrangement  which  Mr.  Froude  may 
agree  to  on  the  subject.  And  finally  we  would  refer  in  confir- 
mation of  our  statements  to  the  fact  that  in  pursuance  of  this 
Agreement  ^1,500  has  been  actually  placed  in  trust  for  Mrs. 
Carlyle  and  the  interest  of  this  sum  paid  by  the  Trustee  to  her. 

Secondly,  as  regards  the  ultimate  disposition  of  the  materials 
of  the  "  Biography "  after  having  been  used  by  Mr.  Froude  for 
the  purpose  of  the  "  Biography,"  it  is  even  plainer  if  possible  than 
in  the  case  of  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences  "  that  Mr.  Froude 
is  under  an  obligation  (whether  legal  or  moral  is  not  to  the 
present  purpose)  to  deliver  them  to  Mrs.  Carlyle,  and  has  not  now, 
whatever  may  have  been  the  case  originally,  any  right  to  destroy 
them. 

Here   is   Mr.   Froude's   language   on   the   subject  written  to 


APPENDIX  155 

Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  on  the  10th  February,  1880,  and  shown  to 
Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle  a  year  before  his  death.  "  It  has,  however, 
long  been  settled  that  you  were  to  have  the  entire  collection  when 
I  had  done  with  it.  Even  if  nothing  had  been  arranged  about  it, 
I  should  of  course  have  replaced  it  in  your  hands." 

Again,  after  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle's  death,  Mr.  Froude  writes 
to  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle  under  date  18th  February,  1881  :  "  His 
directions  to  me  about  the  papers  were  originally  emphatic — '  Do 
not  spare  the  flame ;  the  more  you  burn  the  better.'  It  was  not 
until  the  year  before  last  that  he  desired  me  to  return  them  to 
you  when  I  had  done  with  them,"  clearly  implying  that  the 
directions  to  burn  were  cancelled  by  the  subsequent  instructions 
named. 

Again,  in  the  Times  of  25  th  February,  1881,  Mr.  Froude 
wrote,  "The  papers  belong  to  his  niece,  Mrs.  A.  Carlyle,  to 
whom  he  directed  me  to  return  them." 

We  venture  to  think  that  with  these  considerations  before  him, 
Sir  James  Stephen  will  admit  that  Mr.  Froude,  as  a  man  of 
sensitive  honour,  cannot  now,  and  whatever  course  his  dispute 
with  Mrs.  Carlyle  may  take,  never  could  refuse  to  recognise 
his  pledges  in  respect  of  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences " 
and  the  ultimate  disposition  of  the  materials  for  the  Biography ; 
least  of  all  on  the  ground  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  concurs  in 
Mr.  Froude's  own  estimate  of  the  character  of  those  pledges. 

If  a  friendly  settlement  should  be  come  to  involving  the 
receipt  by  Mrs.  Carlyle  of  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences  " 
and  the  materials  for  the  Biography  without  the  withdrawal  of  the 
present  contention  on  the  part  of  Mr.  Froude  that  such  receipt 
is  by  his  voluntary  gift,  the  result  would  be  a  concession  on  the 
part,  not  of  Mr.  Froude,  but  of  Mrs.  Carlyle,  and  one  which  at 
present  Mrs.  Carlyle  is  unwilling  to  make. 

The  only  other  concession  which  Sir  James  Stephen  refers  to 
does  not  proceed  from  Mr.  Froude,  but  from  the  executors.  We 
do  not  attach  much  weight  to  the  suggestion  that  the  literary 
remains  of  Mr.  Thomas  Carlyle  may  be  held  to  belong  to  the 
executors  personally,  especially  if  it  is  grounded  upon  the 
supposition  of  their  having  no  intrinsic  value,  for  we  cannot 
doubt  that  if  they  were  offered  to  the  public  as  they  stand  there 
would  be  considerable  competition  for  them.  We  presume  the 
executors  are  taking,  and  will  take,  a  reasonable  view  of  their 


156  APPENDIX 

duty,  having  regard  to  the  improbability  of  any  claim  on  the  part 
of  the  residuary  legatees  being  made,  and  if  made,  sustained,  and 
the  indemnity  against  any  such  claim  which  the  executors  can 
have  if  they  desire. 

On  the  whole  therefore  we  shall  be  surprised  if,  on  further 
consideration,  Sir  James  Stephen  does  not  agree  with  Mrs.  Carlyle 
that  she  has  good  reason  to  expect  the  four  advantages  enumerated 
by  him  even  in  the  event  of  an  adverse  decision  upon  any  legal 
title  which  she  may  set  up. 

Having  thus  recorded  Mrs.  Carlyle's  reply  to  Mr.  Froude's 
views,  as  expressed  by  Sir  James  Stephen  on  minor  issues,  we 
desire  to  impress  upon  Mr.  Froude  that  on  the  main  issue, 
namely,  whether  he  is  to  act  upon  the  offer  publicly  made  in  his 
own  letter  in  the  Times  of  9th  May,  1881,  Mr.  Froude  has  not 
as  yet  given  any  reason  for  not  doing  so  which  a  man  of  sensitive 
honour  could  appreciate  as  adequate. 

Three  reasons  have  been  suggested  : — 

1.  That  Mr.  Froude,  though  willing  if  not  anxious  to 
carry  out  this  offer,  was  unable  to  do  so  because  of  a  possible 
claim  on  the  part  of  the  Executors.  This  reason  is  no 
longer  existent,  as  the  Executors  make  no  claim  if 
Mr.  Froude  and  Mrs.  Carlyle  agree.  This  was  the  only 
reason  suggested  during  the  period  which  elapsed  between 
Mr.  Froude's  letter  to  the  Times  of  the  9th  of  May  and  your 
letter  to  us  of  the  19th  August. 

2.  The  second  reason  suggested  is  that  if  Mr.  Froude 
were  to  act  upon  his  public  offer  he  would  remain  unre- 
munerated  for  considerable  labour  in  respect  of  which  he  is 
entitled  to  expect  remuneration.  The  answer  is,  Mrs.  Carlyle 
will  meet  this  objection  by  relinquishing  in  favour  of 
Mr.  Froude  her  right  to  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences," 
which  at  the  present  moment  amount  to  upwards  of  ^1,500 
with  more  to  come. 

3.  The  third  reason  suggested  is  that  if  Mr.  Froude  were 
to  act  upon  his  public  offer  it  would  place  him  in  the 
humiliating  position  of  bowing  to  an  adverse  public  verdict 
(which  however  Mr.  Froude  does  not  admit  to  have  been 
adverse)  upon  his  literary  taste  as  evinced  by  the  publication 
of  the  "  Reminiscences." 


APPENDIX  157 

The  answer  is,  first,  that  so  far  as  the  abandonment  of  the 
Biography  is  humiliating  that  humiliation  has  already  been 
incurred  by  Mr.  Froude's  letter  in  the  Times  of  9th  May, 
secondly,  that  it  is  much  more  humiliating  to  a  man  of 
sensitive  honour  to  recede  from  a  pledge  to  which,  by 
publishing  it  in  the  Times,  he  has  called  upon  the  civilised 
world  to  bear  witness. 

In  conclusion  we  are  desired  to  say  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  holds 
Mr.  Froude  to  this  pledge,  recognising,  however,  his  moral  claim 
to  compensation  for  literary  labour  lost,  by  relinquishing  in  his 
favour  her  right  to  the  profits  of  the  "  Reminiscences." 

Mrs.  Carlyle  will  be  glad  to  hear  that  Mr.  Froude  has  been 
made  personally  acquainted  with  this  expression  of  her  views. 

We  are, 

Yours  faithfully, 

S.  M.  &  J.  B.  Benson. 
Messrs.  Farrer,  Ouvry  &  Co. 

Further  correspondence  ensued,  from  which  it  appeared  that 
Froude,  supported  by  Sir  James  Stephen,  was  determined  to  go 
on  with  his  "  Life  of  Carlyle,"  and  declined  even  to  discuss  the 
matter  with  mutual  friends  of  his  and  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle,  such 
as  Mr.  Stansfeld  or  Professor  Masson.  It  was  to  prevent  him  from 
writing  the  "  Life  "  that  Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  had  striven,  but 
she  was  advised  that,  having  lent  him  the  papers  for  that  specific 
purpose,  she  could  not  insist  on  their  return  until  that  purpose 
was  accomplished,  and  that  Froude  was  not  legally  bound  by  his 
unconditional  offer  to  return  them  at  once,  if  he  chose  to  stand 
confessed  a  promise-breaker  in  the  sight  of  all  men.  She  was 
therefore  obliged  helplessly.to  wait  and  watch  with  grief  and  indigna- 
tion what  she  regarded  as  the  profanation  of  her  uncle's  memory. 

Mrs.  Alexander  Carlyle  claimed  and  received  the  profits  of 
the  "  Reminiscences,"  less  ^300  which  went  to  Froude,  not  as  a 
gift  from  Froude,  but  as  a  part  of  the  provision  her  uncle  had 
made  for  her,  and  ultimately,  when  the  mischief  of  the  "  Life  " 
was  done,  all  the  papers  which  Froude  had  claimed  as  his  own 
and  had  maintained  his  right  to  burn  were  returned  to  her. 
These  papers  are  preserved,  and  amongst  them  are  many,  still  un- 
published, of  profound  interest,  which,  when  they  appear,  will  help 
further  to  disclose  the  great  injustice  done  to  Carlyle  by  Froude. 


158  APPENDIX 

II. 

Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  on  Froude. 

In  recent  discussions  on  the  Carlyle  controversy  nothing  has 
been  more  remarkable  than  the  entire  ignorance  of  its  origins  and 
merits  betrayed  by  some  of  those  who  have  written  about  it, 
especially  by  those  who  have  done  so  most  dogmatically.  This 
is  no  doubt  owing  to  the  fact  that  the  Press  is  now  largely  manned 
by  young  men  who  knew  not  Thomas,  or  James  Anthony,  and 
who  have  not  access  to  the  crushing  criticisms  with  which  the 
writings  of  the  latter  about  the  former  were  received  at  the  time 
of  their  appearance.  Of  these  criticisms  there  were  none  more 
crushing,  albeit  gently  and  even  gingerly  applied,  than  those  of 
Professor  Charles  Eliot  Norton  in  his  Edition  of  the  "  Remini- 
scences "  and  of  the  "  Early  Letters "  of  Carlyle.  These  must 
have  been  peine  forte  et  dare  to  Froude,  but  he  endured  them 
silently  and  no  compurgators  appeared.  It  is  only  now  when 
the  books  containing  them  are  only  to  be  met  with  in  some 
secondhand  booksellers'  shop,  that  an  attempt  is  made  in  "  My 
Relations  with  Carlyle  " — a  feeble  and  futile  attempt — to  answer 
one  or  two  of  the  least  damaging  of  them.  As  Professor  Norton 
is  an  eminent  authority  amongst  literary  men,  both  in  this  country 
and  in  America,  we  think  it  well  to  recall  one  or  two  of  his 
strictures  on  Froude's  biographical  methods  in  addition  to  those 
referred  to  in  the  text. 

With  reference  to  Froude's  "  Life  of  Carlyle,"  Professor  Norton 
writes : — 

" '  Express  biography  of  me  I  had  really  rather  that  there 
should  be  none,'  said  Carlyle  in  his  Will,  and  a  biography  of  him, 
correct  at  least  if  meagre,  might  perhaps  have  been  gathered  from 
his  letters,  his  Reminiscences  and  the  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle.  Mr.  Froude,  however,  thought  otherwise,  and  has 
given  to  the  public  an  'express  biography  of  him.'  The  view 
of  Mr.  Carlyle's  character  presented  in  this  biography  has  not 
approved  itself  to  many  of  those  who  knew  Carlyle  best.  It  may 
be  a  striking  picture,  but  it  is  not  a  good  portrait. 

"  For  the  present,  at  least,  it  appears  impracticable  to  prepare 


APPENDIX  159 

another  formal  biography.  The  peculiar  style  of  Mr.  Froude's 
performance,  already  in  possession  of  the  field,  might  perhaps  put 
a  portrait  of  Carlyle  drawn  by  a  hand  more  faithful  to  nature,  and 
less  skilled  in  fine  artifices  than  his  own,  at  a  temporary  dis- 
advantage with  the  bulk  of  readers.  But  it  has  seemed  right  to 
print  some  of  Carlyle's  letters  in  such  wise  that  with  his 
Reminiscences  they  might  serve  as  a  partial  autobiography,  and 
illustrate  his  character  by  unquestionable  evidence.  They  do 
not  indeed  afford  a  complete  portrait ;  but  so  far  as  they  go  the 
lines  will  be  correct." 

With  regard  to  the  love  letters,  Professor  Norton  writes : — 

"  As  to  what  use  I  might  be  justified  in  making  of  another 
series  of  letters  at  my  disposal,  those  from  Carlyle  to  Miss  Welsh 
from  their  first  acquaintance  in  182 1  until  their  marriage  in  1826, 
I  have  felt  grave  doubts.  The  letters  of  lovers  are  sacred  con- 
fidences, whose  sanctity  none  ought  to  violate.  Mr.  Froude's  use 
of  these  letters  seems  to  me,  on  general  grounds,  unjustifiable, 
and  the  motives  he  alleges  for  it  inadequate.  But  Carlyle  himself 
had  strictly  forbidden  their  printing.  When  he  was  editing  the 
Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh  Carlyle,  of  her  letters  to 
him,  and  of  his  to  her,  which  were  written  before  their  marriage, 
only  one  short  note  from  Miss  Welsh,  dated  3rd  September,  1825, 
printed  by  Mr.  Froude  {Life,  I.,  308,  309),  could  be  found ;  the 
rest  were  missing.  To  the  copy  of  this  short  note  Carlyle  appends 
the  words,  '  In  pencil  all  but  the  address.  Original  strangely 
saved  ;  and  found  accidentally  in  one  of  the  presses  to-day.  Her 
note,  when  put  down  by  the  coach,  on  that  visit  to  us  at  Hoddam 
Hill  in  September,  1825  !  How  mournful  now,  how  beautiful  and 
strange!  A  relic  to  me  priceless  (T.  C,  12th  March,  1868).' 
As  to  the  then  missing  Letters  written  before  their  marriage,  his 
and  Miss  Welsh's,  Carlyle,  in  the  original  manuscript  from  which 
the  copy  given  to  Mr.  Froude  was  made,  says,  '  My  strict 
command  now  is,  "  burn  them,  if  ever  found.  Let  no  third  party 
read  them ;  let  no  printing  of  them,  or  of  any  part  of  them,  be 
ever  thought  of  by  those  who  love  me!"' 

"  I  decided  not  to  open  the  parcels  containing  these  letters. 
But  I  was  gradually  led  by  many  facts  to  the  conviction  that 
Mr.  Froude  had  distorted  their  significance,  and  had  given  a 
view  of  the  relations  between  Carlyle  and   his  future  wife,  in 


i6o  APPENDIX 

essential  respects  incorrect  and  injurious  to  their  memory.  I 
therefore  felt  obliged  to  read  these  letters,  which  I  have  done 
with  extreme  reluctance,  and  with  reverential  respect  for  the 
sacredness  of  their  contents.  The  conviction  which  determined 
me  to  read  them  was  confirmed  by  the  perusal.  The  question 
then  arose  whether  further  publication  of  them  was  justifiable 
for  the  sake  of  correcting  the  view  presented  by  Mr.  Froude. 
The  answer  seemed  plain,  that  only  such  of  these  letters,  or  such 
portions  of  them,  as  had  not  any  specifically  private  character, 
could  rightly  be  printed.  I  have,  therefore,  printed  comparatively 
few  of  Carlyle's  letters  to  Miss  Welsh,  while,  in  an  Appendix  to 
Volume  II.,  I  have  tried  to  set  right  some  of  the  facts  misrepre- 
sented by  Mr.  Froude,  and  to  show  his  method  of  dealing  with 
his  materials." 

"  The  nineteenth  chapter  of  the  first  volume  of  Mr.  Froude's 
Life  is  in  great  part  occupied  with  an  account  of  various  pro- 
jects considered  by  Carlyle  and  Miss  Welsh,  after  their  engage- 
ment, in  regard  to  a  place  of  residence  and  other  necessary 
arrangements  preliminary  to  marriage.  Mr.  Froude  paints 
Carlyle  as  throughout  selfish  and  inconsiderate  of  the  interests 
of  Miss  Welsh  and  her  Mother.  But  the  letters  which  he  prints 
complete  or  in  part,  as  well  as  those  which  he  does  not  print,  do 
not  seem  to  support  this  view.  '  However  deeply,'  he  says,  '  she 
honoured  her  chosen  husband,  she  could  not  hide  from  herself 
that  he  was  selfish — extremely  selfish '  (page  337).  This  charge 
Miss  Welsh  may  be  allowed  to  deny  for  herself.  '  I  think  you 
nothing  but  what  is  noble  and  wise.'  'At  the  bottom  of  my 
heart,  far  from  censuring,  I  approve  of  your  whole  conduct ' 
(4th  March,  1826).  '  It  is  now  five  years  since  we  first  met — five 
blessed  years  !  During  that  period  my  opinion  of  you  has  never 
wavered,  but  gone  on  deliberately  rising  to  a  higher  and  higher 
degree  of  regard'  (28th  June,  1826). 

"  The  apparent  disposition  to  represent  in  an  unpleasant  light 
the  character  and  conduct  of  Carlyle,  as  well  as  of  Miss  Welsh 
and  her  Mother,  which  marks  Mr.  Froude's  narrative,  is  displayed 
in  many  minor  disparaging  statements,  so  made  as  to  avoid 
arousing  suspicion  of  their  having  little  or  no  foundation,  and 
arranged  so  as  to  contribute  artfully  to  the  general  effect  of  depre- 
ciation.     A   single    instance   will    suffice    for    illustration.     On 


APPENDIX  161 

page  337  Mr.  Froude  says,  '  For  her  daughter's  sake  she  [Mrs. 
Welsh]  was  willing  to  make  an  effort  to  like  him,  and,  since  the 
marriage  was  to  be,  either  to  live  with  him  or  to  accept  him  as 
her  son-in-law  in  her  own  house  and  in  her  own  circle.  .  .  . 
Mrs.  Welsh  had  a  large  acquaintance.  He  liked  none  of 
them,  and  "her  visitors  would  neither  be  diminished  in 
numbers,  nor  bettered  in  quality."  No !  he  must  have  the 
small  house  in  Edinburgh;  and  "the  moment  he  was  master 
•of  a  house  the  first  use  he  would  turn  it  to  would  be  to  slam 
the  door  against  nauseous  intruders." '  The  fact  is  that  no 
such  plan  as  would  appear  from  Mr.  Froude's  statement  was  in 
question.  The  plan  was,  as  Miss  Welsh  sets  it  forth  in  a  letter 
■of  i st  February,  1826,  that  Carlyle  was  to  hire  a  little  house  in 
Edinburgh,  '  and  next  November  we  are  to — hire  one  within  some 
dozen  yards  of  it,  so  that  we  may  all  live  together  like  one  family 
until  such  time  as  we  are  married,  and  after.  I  had  infinite 
trouble  in  bringing  my  mother  to  give  ear  to  this  magnificent 
project.  She  was  clear  for  giving  up  fortune,  house-gear,  every- 
thing to  you  and  I  [sic]  and  going  to  live  with  my  poor  old 
grandfather  at  Templand.  .  .  .  But  how  do  you  relish  my  plan  ? 
Should  you  not  like  to  have  such  agreeable  neighbours?  We 
would  walk  together  every  day,  and  you  would  come  and  take 
tea  with  us  at  night.  To  me  it  seems  as  if  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  were  at  hand.'  To  this  Carlyle  replied,  9th  February, 
'  What  a  bright  project  you  have  formed  !  Matured  in  a  single 
night,  like  Jack's  Bean  in  the  Nursery  Tale,  and  with  houses  in  it 
too.  Ah,  Jane,  Jane,  I  fear  it  will  never  answer  half  so  well  in 
practice  as  [it]  does  on  paper.  It  is  impossible  for  two  households 
to  live  as  if  they  were  one  ;  doubly  impossible  (if  there  were 
-degrees  of  impossibility)  in  the  present  circumstances.  I  shall 
never  get  any  enjoyment  of  your  company  till  you  are  all 
my  own.  How  often  have  you  seen  me  with  pleasure  in  the 
presence  of  others?  How  often  with  positive  dissatisfaction? 
For  your  own  sake  I  should  rejoice  to  learn  that  you  were  settled 
in  Edinburgh ;  a  scene  much  fitter  for  you  than  your  present  one  : 
(but  I  had  rather  that  it  were  with  me  than  with  any  other.  Are 
you  sure  that  the  number  of  parties  and  formal  visitors  would  be 
diminished  in  number  or  bettered  in  quality,  according  to  the 
present  scheme  ? '  [This  refers  to  Miss  Welsh's  frequent  com- 
plaint on  this  score.     In  one  of  her  last  letters,  8th  December,  1825, 

M 


i62  APPENDIX 

she  had  spoken  of  recent  visitors  at  Haddington,  and  declared,. 
'  This  has  been  a  more  terrible  infliction  than  anything  that  befell 
our  friend  Job.'  Carlyle  goes  on]  '  My  very  heart  also  sickens- 
at  these  things :  the  moment  I  am  master  of  a  house  the  first  use 
I  turn  it  to  will  be  to  slam  the  door  of  it  on  the  face  of  nauseous, 
intrusions  [not  '  intruders,'  as  Mr.  Froude  prints],  of  all  sorts, 
which  it  can  exclude.' 

"  On  page  342  Mr.  Froude  says,  '  When  it  had  been  proposed 
that  he  should  live  with  Mrs.  Welsh  at  Haddington,  he  would  by 
consenting  have  spared  the  separation  of  a  mother  from  an  only 
child,  and  would  not  perhaps  have  hurt  his  own  intellect  by  an 
effort  of  self-denial.' 

"  No  proposal  to  live  with  Mrs.  Welsh  at  Haddington  was  ever 
made.  In  a  letter  of  16th  March,  1826,  a  part  of  which,  including 
the  following  sentences,  is  printed  by  Mr.  Froude  himself  (page  343),, 
Miss  Welsh  says,  '  My  mother,  like  myself,  has  ceased  to  feel  any 
contentment  in  this  pitiful  [not  '  hateful '  as  printed]  Haddington,, 
and  is  bent  on  disposing  of  our  house  here  as  soon  as  may  be, 
and  hiring  one  elsewhere.  Why  should  it  not  be  in  the  vicinity 
of  Edinburgh  after  all  ?  and  why  should  not  you  live  with  your 
wife  in  her  [not  '  your,'  as  printed]  mother's  house  ? ' 

"  There  is  no  foundation  whatever  for  the  statements  (page  336)' 
that  '  all  difficulties  might  be  got  over  ...  if  the  family  could 
be  kept  together,'  and  that  '  this  arrangement  occurred  to  every 
one  who  was  interested  in  the  Welshes'  welfare  as  the  most, 
obviously  desirable.'  Mrs.  Welsh's  '  consent  to  take  Carlyle 
into  the  family  ....  made  Miss  Welsh  perfectly  happy.' 
Mrs.  Welsh's  consent  does  not  appear  to  have  ever  been  asked,, 
much  less  to  have  been  given  to  any  such  arrangement.  In  a 
part  of  Miss  Welsh's  letter  of  16th  March,  not  quoted  by 
Mr.  Froude,  she  says  :  '  I  will  propose  the  thing  to  my  mother,' 
that  is,  the  project  that  they  should  all  live  together,  in  case- 
Carlyle  should  approve  it.  He  wisely  did  not  approve  it- 
Mr.  Froude's  account  of  the  whole  matter  is  a  tissue  of  confusion 
and  misrepresentation. 

"  One  more  example  of  Mr.  Froude's  method,  and  I  have  done. 
The  following  passage  is  from  page  358,  it  refers  to  arrangements 
for  the  journey  to  Edinburgh  after  the  wedding.  '  Carlyle,. 
thrifty  always,  considered  it  might  be  expedient  to  "  take  seats  in 
the  coach  from  Dumfries."     The  coach  would  be  safer  than  a 


APPENDIX  163 

•carriage,  more  certain  of  arriving,  etc.  So  nervous  was  he,  too, 
that  he  wished  his  brother  John  to  accompany  them  on  their 
journey — at  least  part  of  the  way.' 

"  What  foundation  this  insinuation  of  mean  and  tasteless  thrift 
on  Carlyle's  part,  and  of  silly  nervousness,  possesses,  may  be  seen 
from  the  following  extracts  from  a  letter  of  Carlyle's  of  19th 
September.  '  One  other  most  humble  care  is  whether  we  can 
calculate  on  getting  post  horses  and  chaises  all  the  way  to 
Edinburgh  without  danger  of  let,  or  [if]  it  would  not  be  better  to 
take  seats  in  the  coach  for  some  part  of  it?  In  this  matter  I 
suppose  you  can  give  me  no  light :  perhaps  your  mother  might. 
At  all  events  tell  me  your  taste  in  the  business,  for  the  coach  is 
sure,  if  the  other  is  not.  .  .  .  John  and  I  will  come  to  Glendin- 
ning's  Inn  the  night  before  ;  he  may  ride  with  us  the  first  stage 
if  you  like  ;  then  come  back  with  the  chaise,  and  return  home 
on  the  back  of  Larry,  richer  by  one  sister  (in  relations)  than  he 
ever  was.     Poor  Jack  ! ' 

"  Such  is  the  treatment  that  the  most  sacred  parts  of  the  lives 
of  Carlyle  and  his  wife  receive  at  the  hands  of  his  trusted 
biographer !  There  is  no  need,  I  believe,  to  speak  of  it  in  the 
terms  it  deserves. 

"  The  lives  of  Carlyle  and  his  wife  are  not  represented  as  they 
were  in  this  book  of  Mr.  Froude's.  There  was  much  that  was 
sorrowful  in  their  experience ;  much  that  was  sad  in  their  relations 
to  each  other.  Their  mutual  love  did  not  make  them  happy,  did 
not  supply  them  with  the  self-control  required  for  happiness. 
Their  faults  often  prevailed  against  their  love,  and  yet  '  with  a 
thousand  faults  they  were  both,'  as  Carlyle  said  to  Miss  Welsh 
(25th  May,  1823),  'true-hearted  people.'  And  through  all  the 
dark  vicissitudes  of  life  love  did  not  desert  them.  Blame  each  of 
them  as  one  may  for  carelessness,  hardness,  bitterness,  in  the 
course  of  the  years,  one  reads  their  lives  wholly  wrong  unless  he 
read  in  them  that  the  love  that  had  united  them  was  beyond  the 
power  of  fate  and  fault  to  ruin  utterly,  that  more  permanent  than 
aught  else  it  abided  in  the  heart  of  each,  and  that  in  what  they 
were  to  each  other  it  remained  the  unalterable  element." 


1 64  APPENDIX 


III. 

Mrs.  Oliphant  on  Mrs.  Carlyle  and  Froude. 

Mrs.  Oliphant  was  united  by  ties  of  the  closest  friendship  to 
Mrs.  Carlyle  in  her  later  years,  and  had  special  qualifications  for 
understanding  her  highly  complex,  sensitive,  and  mobile  nature. 
Herself  characteristically  Scotch,  and  with  an  intimate  knowledge 
of  her  countrywomen,  she  could  enter  with  sympathetic  insight 
into  those  feelings  and  habits  of  thought  of  her  friend,  having 
their  origin  in  inheritance  and  early  nurture,  which  to  the 
Southerner  must  often  have  remained  obscure  and  unintelligible. 
Practised  in  the  analysis  of  that  puzzling  and  subtle  compound — 
the  female  heart — her  Miss  Majoribanks,  her  Phoebe  Beecham, 
and  her  Julia  Herbert,  show  to  what  mastery  in  its  chemistry  she 
had  attained — she  was  able  to  distinguish  with  delicate  precision 
the  true  metal  in  Mrs.  Carlyle's  nature  from  the  alloys  fused  into 
it  by  sickness  and  chagrin.  An  expert  in  biography — her  "  Life 
of  Edward  Irving "  is  an  admirable  performance — she  knew 
how  far  in  this  species  of  literature  revelations  could  properly  go, 
and  how  necessary  to  it,  is  not  only  enthusiasm,  but  sober  judg- 
ment, a  sense  of  proportion  and  fidelity  to  truth.  She  was,  there- 
fore, singularly  well  entitled  to  judge  of  Froude's  representation 
of  her  friend,  and  we  should  like  to  be  able  to  reproduce  the 
whole  of  her  withering  denunciation  of  him  and  his  methods  con- 
tained in  an  article  which  appeared  in  the  "  Contemporary 
Review  "  for  May,  1883,  and  which  was  allowed  to  pass  unanswered, 
although  it  was  as  unsparing  in  its  criticism  as  the  Introduction 
and  Notes  to  the  "  New  Letters  and  Memorials  of  Jane  Welsh 
Carlyle,"  which  are  said  to  have  provoked  the  publication  of 
"  My  Relations  with  Carlyle."  We  must,  however,  content  our- 
selves with  one  or  two  extracts  bearing  in  an  illuminative  way  on 
points  which  have  been  dealt  with  in  the  text. 

With  regard  to  "  The  Letters  and  Memorials,"  as  issued  by 
Froude,  Mrs.  Oliphant  says  : — 

"  Mrs.  Carlyle,  the  writer  of  the  letters  now  given  to  the  world 
in  three  large  volumes,  following  in  the  wake  of  four  other  large 
volumes — all  given  to  the  elucidation  of  a  portion  of  the  life  of 
a  great  writer,  to  whom  very  few  things  ever  happened — has  had 


APPENDIX  165 

a  cruel  fate  since  the  death  of  her  husband  deprived  her  of  her 
last  bulwark  against  that  Nemesis  known  amongst  men  by  the 
name  of  Froude.  Her  fate  is  all  the  harder  that  she  really  has 
done  nothing  to  deserve  it.  She  narrated  freely  all  the  events  of 
her  life  as  they  occurred,  according  to  the  humour  of  the  moment, 
and  the  gift  that  was  in  her :  which  was  a  very  rare  and  fine  gift, 
but  one  that  naturally  led  to  an  instinctive  seizing  of  all  possible 
dramatic  effects,  and  much  humorous  heightening  of  colour  and 
deepening  of  interest.  Her  power  of  story-telling  was  extra- 
ordinary, as  well  as  the  whimsical  humour  that  took  hold  of  every 
ludicrous  incident,  and  made  out  of  a  walk  in  the  streets  a  whole 
amusing  Odyssey  of  adventure ;  and  it  was  one  of  the  chief 
amusements  of  her  house  and  her  friends.  What  she  thus  did  in 
speech  she  did  also  in  her  letters,  with  a  vivacity  and  humour  which 
lend  something  interesting  even  to  the  hundredth  headache,  domestic 
squabble,  or  house  cleaning  recorded.  But  all  this  was  for  her 
friends ;  there  is  not  the  slightest  evidence  that  she,  at  least,  ever 
intended  these  narratives  for  the  world.  She  was  the  proudest 
woman — as  proud  and  tenacious  of  her  dignity  as  a  savage  chief. 
And  of  all  things  in  the  world,  to  be  placed  on  a  pedestal  before 
men  as  a  domestic  martyr,  an  unhappy  wife,  the  victim  of  a  harsh 
husband,  is  the  last  which  she  would  have  tolerated.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  her  whole  existence  has  been  violated,  every  scrap  of 
decent  drapery  torn  from  her,  and  herself  exhibited  as  perhaps 
never  modest  and  proud  matron  was  before  to  the  comments  of 
the  world.  Carlyle  himself  rushed  upon  his  fate  by  his  will  and 
choice,  by  foolish  belief  in  the  flattering  suggestion  that  everything 
that  concerned  him  must  be  interesting  to  the  world,  and  by  a 
misplaced  and  too  boundless  trust  in  the  friends  of  his  later  life. 
But  Mrs.  Carlyle  did  nothing  to  lay  herself  open  to  this  fate.  She 
did  not  confide  her  reputation  to  Mr.  Froude,  or  give  him  leave 
to  unveil  her  inmost  life  according  to  his  own  interpretation  of  it : 
and  it  is  thus  doubly  hard  upon  her  that  she  should  have  been 
made  to  play  the  part  of  heroine  in  the  tragedy,  which  his  pictorial 
and  artistic  instincts  have  made  out  of  his  master's  life. 

"  It  would  be  in  vain  to  attempt  to  set  this  injured  and  outraged 
woman  right  with  the  world  in  respect  of  the  earlier  portion  of 
her  life,  to  which  the  biographer  of  her  husband  has  given  the 
turn  that  pleased  him,  under  the  almost,  if  not  altogether,  unanimous 
protest  of  all  who  knew  her,  but  quite  to  the  satisfaction  of  the 


1 66  APPENDIX 

crowd  who  did  not,  and  to  whom,  indeed,  such  a  fine  conventiona 
example  of  the  hard  fate  of  the  wife  of  a  man  of  genius  was, 
perhaps,  never  afforded  before.  We  may,  perhaps,  be  permitted, 
however,  to  say,  though  with  little  hope  of  convincing  any  reader 
unacquainted  with  the  class  to  which  Mrs.  Carlyle  belonged,  or 
either  traditionally  or  personally  with  the  Scotland  of  her  time, 
that  the  assumption  upon  which  Mr.  Froude  goes,  of  her  im- 
measurable social  superiority,  and  the  tremendous  descent  she 
made  in  becoming  the  housekeeper  and  almost  the  domestic 
servant  of  her  husband,  is  a  mistake  and  misconception  of  the 
most  fundamental  kind.  It  has  indeed  the  justification  of 
Carlyle's  own  magniloquent  description : — '  From  birth  upwards 
she  had  lived  in  opulence '  repeated  in  these  volumes ;  but  then 
Carlyle  described  his  little  house  in  Chelsea  as  made  into 
a  sort  of  palace  by  her  exertions,  which  Mr.  Froude  and  all 
her  friends  are  aware  was  a  good  deal  more  than  the  fact. 
The  '  opulence '  of  the  country  doctor's  daughter  was  something 
of  the  same  kind.  Modest  comfort,  even  luxury  in  a  sober  way, 
the  highest  estimation,  and  all  the  petting  and  pleasures  that  an 
only  beloved  child  could  be  surrounded  with,  she  no  doubt  had. 
But  life  in  Haddington  in  the  first  quarter  of  this  century  was  not 
like  life  in  South  Kensington  in  the  present  day.  The  woman's 
share  of  the  world's  work  was  very  distinct,  and  was  despised  by 
no  one.  There  is  no  evidence  that  Dr.  Welsh  was  ever  rich — so 
far,  indeed,  is  the  evidence  against  this,  that  his  daughter  had  to 
make  over  the  little  property  of  Craigenputtock,  in  order  to 
secure  her  mother's  independence,  leaving  herself  penniless.  But 
even  had  she  been  left  with  a  dot,  proportioned  to  her  position, 
and  had  she  married  one  of  her  father's  assistants,  or  a  neigh- 
bouring minister — her  natural  fate — there  is  no  reason  to  suppose 
that  she  would  have  been  much  more  elevated  above  the  cares  of 
common  life  that  she  was  as  the  wife  of  Thomas  Carlyle.  .  .  . 
The  present  writer,  though  of  a  later  generation  than  Mrs.  Carlyle, 
was  trained  to  believe  that  a  woman  should  be  able  to  '  turn  her 
hand '  to  any  domestic  duty  that  might  be  necessary.  And  the 
pathetic  picture  of  an  elegant  young  lady  descending  from  her 
elevated  sphere  to  make  the  bread,  and  even  to  mend  the 
trousers  of  her  husband,  which  has  touched  the  sympathetic 
public  to  such  indignation,  is  ludicrous  to  those  to  whom  the  fact 
of  both  positions  is  known." 


APPENDIX  167 

With  reference  to  the  conjugal  relations  of  the  Carlyles,  Mrs. 
Oliphant  writes  : — ■ 

"  We  confess  for  our  own  part  that  the  manner  of  mind  which 
can  deduce  from  this  long  autobiography  an  idea  injurious  to  the 
perfect  union  of  these  two  kindred  souls,  is  to  us  incompre- 
hensible. They  tormented  each  other,  but  not  half  as  much  as 
each  tormented  him  and  herself;  they  were  too  like  each  other, 
suffering  in  the  same  way  from  nerves  disordered  and  digestion 
impaired,  and  excessive  self-consciousness,  and  the  absence  of  all 
other  objects  in  their  life.  They  were,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the 
word,  everything  to  each  other — for  good  and  evil,  sole  com- 
forters, chief  tormenters.  '  111  to  hae  but  waur  to  want,'  says 
the  proverb,  which  must  have  been  framed  in  view  of  some  such 
exaggerated  pair ;  perhaps,  since  the  proverb  is  Scotch,  the 
conditions  of  mind  may  be  a  national  one.  Sometimes  Carlyle 
was  '  ill  to  have,'  but  it  is  abundantly  evident  that  he  was  '  waur 
to  want,' — i.e.,  to  be  without — to  his  wife.  To  him,  though  he 
wounded  her  in  a  hundred  small  matters,  there  is  no  evidence 
that  she  was  ever  anything  else  than  the  most  desirable  of  women,, 
understood  and  acknowledged  as  the  setter-right  of  all  things,  the 
providence  and  first  authority  of  life. 

"  If  these  two  remarkable  people  had  been,  like  others, 
allowed  without  any  theory  to  tell  their  own  story,  and  express 
their  own  sentiments,  what  we  should  now  do  would  be  to  give 
our  readers  a  glimpse,  tranquilly,  of  the  domestic  economy  of  that 
little  house,  of  which  its  mistress  was  justly  proud,  as  a  triumph  of 
her  own  exertions,  and  its  master  somewhat  grandiloquent  upon, 
as  something  in  itself  more  beautiful  and  remarkable  than  any 
house  in  Cheyne  Row  could  ever  be.  We  would  tell  them  of  her 
tea-parties,  her  evening  visitors,  of  the  little  Peasweep  of  a  maid 
who  insisted  on  bringing  up  four  teacups  every  evening,  while 
Mrs.  Carlyle  and  her  mother  were  alone  in  the  house,  with  a  con- 
viction, never  disappointed,  that  '  the  gentlemen '  would  drop  in. 
to  use  them ;  of  how  she  bought  her  sofa,  and  adapted  an  old 
mattress  to  it,  and  made  a  cover  for  it,  and  so  procured  this 
comfort,  at  the  small  cost  of  one  pound,  out  of  her  own  private 
pocket ;  of  how  the  cocks  and  hens  next  door,  and  the  dog  that 
would  bark,  and  even  the  piano  on  the  other  side  of  the  party-wall, 
were  '  written  down '  by  appeals  to  the  magnanimity  of  the  owners,, 
on  behalf  of  the  unfortunate  man  of  genius  who  could  not  get 


168  APPENDIX 

his  books  written,  or  even  by  bribes  cleverly  administered  when 
persuasion  and  reason  both  failed.  The  pages  teem  with  domestic 
incidents  in  every  kind  of  ornamental  setting,  all  told  with  such  an 
unfailing  life  and  grace,  that,  had  the  facts  themselves  been  of  the 
first  importance,  they  could  not  have  charmed  us  more  ;  and  we 
do  not  grudge  the  three  big  volumes  so  filled,  in  which  there  is  not 
from  beginning  to  end  an  event  more  important  than  new  painting 
and  papering,  new  maid-servants,  an  illness  or  an  expedition. 
But  as  circumstances  stand,  the  reader  is  not  sufficiently  easy  in 
his  mind  to  be  content  with  these,  but  has  been  so  fretted  and 
troubled  by  Mr.  Froude  and  his  theories,  and  the  determination 
which  moulds  all  that  gentleman's  thoughts  to  make  out  that 
Carlyle  was  a  sort  of  ploughman-despot,  and  his  wife  an  unwilling 
and  resentful  slave,  that  we  must  proceed  first  to  find  foundations 
for  the  house,  of  which  we  know  more  in  all  its  details  than 
perhaps  of  any  house  that  has  been  built  and  furnished  in  this 
century.  Was  it  founded  on  the  rock  of  love  and  true  union,  or 
was  it  a  mere  four  walls,  no  home  at  all,  in  which  the  rude  master 
made  his  thrall  labour  for  him,  and  crushed  her  delicate  nature 
in  return  ?  " 

Mrs.  Oliphant  supplies  the  answer  to  that  question  out  of 
Mrs.  Carlyle's  own  mouth,  and  shows  from  her  letters  how  cruelly 
and  egregiously  Froude  has  erred  in  dealing  with  her  relations 
with  her  husband.  Touching  on  the  submission  of  Mrs.  Carlyle's 
private  Journal  to  Miss  Jewsbury  by  Froude,  for  the  elucidation 
of  its  dark  passages,  Mrs.  Oliphant  says  : — • 

"  So  Geraldine,  in  a  piece  of  fine  writing — words  as  untrue  as 
ever  words  were,  as  every  unprejudiced  reader  of  this  book  will  see 
for  himself,  and  entirely  contrary  to  that  kind  soul's  ordinary  testi- 
mony. Not  a  critic,  so  far  as  we  are  aware,  has  ever  suggested  that 
this  proceeding  was  unjustifiable  or  outside  of  the  limits  of  honour. 
Is  it  then  permissible  to  outrage  the  memory  of  a  wife,  and  betray 
her  secrets  because  one  has  received  as  a  gift  her  husband's 
papers?  She  gave  no  permission,  left  no  authority  for  such  a 
proceeding.  Does  the  disability  of  women  go  so  far  as  this? 
or  is  there  no  need  for  honour  in  respect  to  the  dead  ?  '  There 
ought  to  be  no  mystery  about  Carlyle,'  says  Mr.  Froude.  No, 
poor  foolish,  fond  old  man  !  there  is  no  mystery  about  him  hence- 
forward, thanks  to  his  own  distracted  babble  of  genius,  first  of  all. 
But   how   about   his   wife?     Did   she   authorise    Mr.  Froude  to 


APPENDIX  169 

unveil  her  most  secret  thoughts,  her  darkest  hours  of  weakness, 
which  even  her  husband  passed  reverently  over  ?  No  woman  of 
this  generation,  or  of  any  other  we  are  acquainted  with,  has  had 
such  desperate  occasion  to  be  saved  from  her  friends  :  and  public 
feeling  and  sense  of  honour  must  be  at  a  low  ebb  indeed  when 
no  one  ventures  to  stand  up  and  to  stigmatize  as  it  deserves  this 
betrayal  and  exposure  of  the  secret  of  a  woman's  weakness,  a 
secret  which  throws  no  light  upon  anything,  which  does  not  add 
to  our  knowledge  either  of  her  character  or  her  husband's,  and 
with  which  the  public  had  nothing  whatever  to  do  !  " 

Would  that  Mrs.  Oliphant  were  with  us  again — to  write  as  she 
once  did  a  whole  number  of  Maga,  and  to  stigmatize  as  they 
deserve  the  betrayals — far  deeper  than  those  which  she  has  so 
vigorously  condemned,  which  Froude,  being  dead,  yet  speaking, 
has  perpetuated  in  "  My  Relations  with  Carlyle  "  ! 


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